Friday's Old Fashioned: Port of Shadows (1938)

“Port of Shadows,” or “The Dock of Mists” in French, was initially banned by the French government, as an opening title explains, for being “immoral, depressing and detrimental to young people.” That’s the antithesis of art, of course, and I’d like to think everybody here knows that, but you can also see why some unscrupulous philistine might have thought that way. “With every sunrise,” says Nelly (Michèle Morgan), “we think something new is going to happen, something fresh. Then the sun goes to bed and so do we.” Funny thing is, as the title suggests, the sun never rises in director Marcel Carné’s poetically realist film; there is just an omnipresent fog enveloping the French port city of Le Havre. That’s where French soldier Jean (Jean Gabin) arrives as “Port of Shadows” begins, having just saved a stray dog from being run over. It’s a hopeful and kind prologue belying a conclusion that is the opposite. This is a movie, after all, that doesn’t see swimmers as people splashing around in the water, as one character puts it, but people waiting to drown. Befitting the genre, that is just about the most poetically realist variation of glass half empty philosophy I’ve ever heard. Bravo.

Though it is never explicitly stated that Jean has gone AWOL, it is implied, nevertheless, in his search for a ship to take him out of Le Havre posthaste. If he is a deserter, Nelly is a runaway, having the fled the home where she lives with her godfather Zabel (Michel Simon) while also trying to evade the pursuit of gangster Lucien (Pierre Brasseur) who, in turn, is seeking her ex-boyfriend Maurice. Zabel is a real piece of work, masquerading as a worldly member of the community even as a self-pitying monster lurks just beneath. “It’s horrible to love like Romeo when you look like Bluebeard,” he says at one point which Simon turns into a comically horrifying whine of desperation. His demise is shocking, not for it happening but how it happens, filmed in canted angles, and scored to the church music the character prefers, a juxtaposition evoking the absence of God, as if we are all left to fend for ourselves. The only thing scarier than his death Lucien’s unnamed lady friend (Jenny Burnay, I think, based on the IMDb credits and accompanying photo which I note because I really want to give the actor credit for this) laughing at him after he is slapped in an amusement park by Jean that is so coldly mocking you can’t help but see why that paper gangster might finally be moved to the movie’s culminating act. 

Jean and Nelly fall in love, of course, but it never feels quite real. That’s a compliment, not a criticism. It is also Carné’s intention, illustrated in Jean’s literal observation that theirs is “Like the movies…love at first sight.” And that’s why in eschewing shipping out to parts unknown to track down Nelly instead, he surrenders to the fantasy even as he opens himself up to Lucien’s revenge. That temptation to deny reality must have been alluring in 1938 France, what with the fall of the Popular Front and a looming World War. Between memory holing the COVID-19 pandemic and rewriting the January 6th insurrection as Not That Bad, America has lately been demonstrating a willingness to deny reality too. And as much as anything while watching “Port of Shadows,” I found myself wishing American movies would stop shrinking from this confusing, terrifying moment with so much of the SOS (same old streaming) and meet it with a whole new genre a la poetic realism to call our own.  

A Post for the Michael Clayton Hive Only

Congratulations to one of St. John’s University’s most distinguished alums, Michael Clayton, class of 1980 and current special counsel specializing in wills and trusts at the law firm of Kenner, Bach & Ledeen, on the basketball team’s first Big East Conference Tournament championship in a quarter-century and first outright Big East Conference championship in 40 years.

Friday's Old Fashioned: A Time for Burning (1966)

How many times have you heard that the best remedy for bridging our great American divide is conversation, sitting down with someone of an opposing viewpoint and talking it through? This proposed solution, however, is nothing new, as “A Time for Burning,” currently streaming on the Criterion Channel, demonstrates. In 1965 at the height of the Civil Rights Movement, a Lutheran minister in Omaha, L. William Youngdahl, sought to have his parishioners engage with black members of the community in conversation to help bridge their divide and perhaps begin the road to integrating their church. But Barbara Connell and Bill Jersey’s ensuing 1966 documentary is not about those conversations. No, it is about the conversations to have those conversations, none of which (spoiler alert) come to pass, as Youngdahl finds a flock laying claim to an open mind while cycling through a litany of close-minded excuses of it being too big a first step, too soon, etc., prompting Youngdahl to wonder aloud, “How many years do I need to prepare myself in order to talk with another human being? What am I waiting for?” The black barber that Youngdahl visits in the documentary’s most searing scene would probably tell him that they’re all waiting out the end of the world.

That black barber turns out to be Ernie Chambers who would go on to become Nebraska’s longest serving state senator. And Youngdahl’s congregation is not juxtaposed against Chambers so much as it is described by Chambers in the exact religiously hypocritical terms that they are shown to embody. Indeed, the two men are not really even having a discussion at all; rather Chambers is telling Youngdahl exactly like it is and in terms as likely to infuriate white liberals as white conservatives. (White Supremacy in one minute explains someone who uploaded this scene to YouTube.) And though “A Time for Burning” might classify itself as cinéma vérité, suggesting it is free from aesthetic embellishment, the severe close-ups of the two men in these moments are incredible. The palpable perspiration on Youngdahl’s face and his agonized eyes encapsulate hearing something so difficult while these intimate glimpses of Chambers capture him just as he is described later: “He talked hate, hate, hate, but his eyes were full of love.” Youngdahl leaves this conversation in distress, and though he professes a genuine desire in wanting to listen, Chambers’s prediction that by merely trying to listen, by trying to do something, Youngdahl will be relieved of his ministerial duty, proves prophetic.

Yet, there is one figurative, even semi-literal, ray of light in the form of Ray Christensen. One of Youngdahl’s parishioners, he begins “A Time for Burning” like all the others, not skeptical, exactly, of the intention but hesitant, worried it will fracture the church, only to experience something like a conversion in meeting with several leaders of the black community in Omaha, including Chambers. Christensen’s very air changes, no longer equivocating but speaking with the forceful clarity of someone who has seen the light, only to be stymied as Youngdahl was by fellow congregants who have not. That includes Christensen’s own wife. She yearns for a return to normalcy, you might say, for the church to remain a place where people can gather in peace. “This isn’t the peace that Christ was talking about,” Christensen says in referring to the organ, the hymns, the stained-glass windows. “It’s the wrapping paper.” “A Time for Burning” brings that wrapping paper to life as it ends with scenes from a church service and a hymn laid over it on the soundtrack that given what we have seen does not feel like an affirmation but an open-ended question. “There is a power in me somewhere / I know it’s there.” 

My Favorite Gene Hackman Line Readings

I know, I know. My eulogy for Gene Hackman argued that he was such a quality actor, he did not even need lines to impart character and feeling. And that’s still true. But movies haven’t been silent since 1927, baby, and though I feel like modern movies would benefit not so much from wordlessness as more attention to visual storytelling, there is also so much character and feeling that can be imparted through line readings. Even more than that, some actors can take certain lines that are dead on arrival and then revive them. Hackman could do both. See below.

“I heard that one myself, Bob. Hell, I even thought I was dead ‘til I found out it was just that I was in Nebraska.” – “Unforgiven” (1992). It’s everything, but it’s chiefly the way he says “Nebraska.” He emphasizes the second syllable by stretching it out, bringing the vast, desolate prairie of the state to life in his elocution and in doing so, improbably, incredibly inverting the neighboring state’s “Is this heaven?” “No, it’s Iowa.” 

“It was just a bunch of N*zi goons.” – “The Package” (1989). As a green beret who finds himself trying to prevent an assassination, the way Hackman says this line, dismissively, with both a literal and figurative shrug, is not making light of their abhorrent ideology, not at all, but rightly reducing it to gum on his shoe.

“Trials are too important to be left up to juries.” – “Runaway Jury” (2003). It’s a trailer line, meaning a line that effectively describes the entire movie, one in which Hackman’s diabolical jury consultant works to swing a trial in favor of his wealthy clients. Yet, Hackman sells it by saying it in such a way to convey how his character is selling something, a service, the little leading chuckle at the end and the fiendish winkle in his eye deftly conveying not so much that the actor is on the joke but that the character is in on the joke, a well-heeled huckster giving you his signature pitch.

“Well, keep your strength in the dribble, alright.” – “Hoosiers” (1986). There’s the moment during the regional finals when the god-fearing bench player Strap is unexpectedly thrust into action and answers the bell and when Hackman’s Coach Norman Dale asks what’s gotten into him, Strap replies, matter-of-factly, “The Lord. I can feel his strength.” And Dale’s reply, gleaned from the two critical baskets Strap scores coming without bouncing the ball even a single time, is a line that Hackman does not render mean-spirited like a non-believer telling a believer he’s full of crap, but more akin to a semi-bemused matter-of-fact strict believer of his own in basketball fundamentals.

“Are you listening to me?” “Yes, I am!” – “The Royal Tenenbaums” (2001). True, few lines have ever made me LLOL (literally laugh out loud) in a movie theater louder than Hackman in this same movie saying, “This is my adopted daughter Margot Tennenbaum,” giving it a real ring of familiar formality, an asshole who does not quite know he’s an asshole, but it’s this line, “Yes, I am” that I think of most. It happens when his son Chas (Ben Stiller) is ordering his father Royal (Hackman) to stay from his sons, Royal’s grandsons, but he’s not sure his dad seems to be hearing. “Are you listening?” Chas demands and the parenthetical instruction in West Anderson and Owen Wilson’s screenplay is “screams” which is exactly how Stiller reads it. Royal’s response in the screenplay, however, contains no such parenthetical and the line “Yes, I am” concludes with a period rather than an exclamation. But Hackman does not just say it; he screams it right back; as he does the following line, “I think you’re having a nervous breakdown!”

Wes Anderson often likes to employ symmetrical frames with his actors looking directly into the camera, essentially opening a portal between them and us. This scene is symmetrically framed, too, though the actors are not looking at us, and yet, Hackman opens that portal, nonetheless. He opens it by seeming to respond to Stiller in the moment, an actor utterly alive to his character, to his scene, to the camera. 

In Memoriam: Gene Hackman

Gene Hackman, dead at 95, was described in some obituaries as a Movie Star and in some obituaries as an Everyman, two contradictions in type that go to show how he occupied a unique place in the firmament of cinema. He was a late bloomer who emerged during the era of so-called New Hollywood, when the idea of what constituted American movies was changing and the idea of what constituted American movie stars was changing too. That’s why despite resembling a truck driver, or a doorman, as Steven Hyden put it a decade ago, Hackman still became someone on par with Paul Newman and Robert Redford. He also brought his own notorious temperamental edginess to his roles, evocative of how a movie star’s personality tends to write over a scripted part, and yet, he vanished into those roles anyway, inhabiting his characters down to the bone so that you could hardly tell it was him, achieving the supreme state of naturalism, acting as being. Consider “The Firm.” Tom Cruise is acting so hard you can practically see the sweat stains while Hackman appears not to try at all, carving a quiet, nigh impossible sympathy for his villain out of thin air. 

That is not to say Hackman did nothing. Far from it. He considered his parts, he made choices. In a 2011 interview with Michael Hainey for GQ, he mentions a seemingly throwaway moment in “The French Connection” when his crude, dogged detective Popeye Doyle makes a pass at a woman and upon being brushed off, tosses a cruller over his shoulder as a key to unlocking his character. He could take the smallest of behaviors and then build a whole person from them. It’s that sort of attention to detail that made him a third thing: an actor’s actor, admired by his most venerable of peers for commitment and technique. Of course, cinema is generally defined as a director’s medium and as the myriad stories Hackman emotionally and vocally brawling with directors on set illuminate, he was not fond of them. “I don’t think he likes directors,” Maura Tierney told The AV Club in 2014 of her “Welcome to Mooseport” costar. “I mean, he did, I believe, tell the director at some point to, uh… [Starts to laugh.] “Will you just shut the fuck up and go over there and say ‘action’ or whatever it is you do?” 

That echoes experiences described with the actor by Wes Anderson during “The Royal Tenenbaums” and David Anspaugh during “Hoosiers,” among others. But by Anspaugh’s own admission, Hackman preferred working on sets with tension and would therefore seek to deliberately create an uncomfortable environment, even if, as Anspaugh noted, the actor would not exactly apologize for it. And whether that method was fair, and whether he took direction or not, he intuitively knew what a director needed, and what a movie needed too. He could fill up the screen and blow his stack with the best, as he did in “Crimson Tide.” In playing the commander of a nuclear submarine warring with his second-in-command (Denzel Washington) he seemed just as much to be playing what he really was, an actor who was king of the action-thriller, and who was now daring his co-star to take that crown, living the part in a way Washington answered. But Hackman also knew better than anyone the value of economy on the big screen; no one effused the ancient adage less is more with such precision. 

A shot from The Conversation that is the perfect symmetry of acting and directing.

When I saw “Hoosiers” at the Music Box Theatre in 2013, Chelcie Ross, a longtime actor who cut his teeth in Chicago and who played Hackman’s semi-nemesis in that movie, spoke, and said his co-star was always revising paragraphs to sentences and sentences to words and words to nothing at all. It was an apt description of the Hackman method. In that movie, he carried the weight of his character’s volatile past in his very air just as in “The Conversation” he seemed to dig a metaphorical moat between himself and the whole world just as in “Twice in a Lifetime” he needed no words beyond mere minor affirmations in the opening dinner table scene to convey a man at once happy in the presence of his family and dissatisfied with life. In the director’s commentary for his 1997 thriller “Breakdown”, Jonathan Mostow noted how his own leading man Kurt Russell would argue for certain lines of dialogue to be cut “because I can act it.” There was never an actor who could act it better than Gene Hackman.

Anora

We meet Ani (Mikey Madison), short for “Anora,” in the middle of a lap dance. That’s because it’s her job, and despite the neon lights and music, it feels no different than, say, peddling candy at Coney Island, another location that writer and director Sean Baker’s movie briefly visits; it’s hard out here. So, hard in fact, that when a wealthy Russian playboy, Ivan (Mark Edelshteyn), pays Ani to be his girlfriend for the week, a la Edward Lewis and Vivian Ward, and whisks her away to Las Vegas and asks her to marry him, she agrees. She is not swept off her feet so much as swept up in his extravagant lifestyle, all embodied in how Baker, who triples as editor, composes this sequence as essentially one breathless rush. And though Ani insists on a 3-carat ring in the wake of his proposal, suggesting she still grasps the transactional nature of their relationship, when Baker drops Robin Schulz’s reworking of Take That’s “Greatest Day” on the soundtrack in the wake of their wedding, the garish Vegas lights they stand beneath manage to momentarily gleam, and you might even believe the song’s words, as she might, that the future is theirs to find.

It isn’t, though. Alas, Ivan is merely the idiot son, to quote the Handsome Furs, of Russian Oligarchs, and upon learning of his sudden marriage, they dispatch two Armenian thugs, Toros (Karren Karagulian) and Garnik (Vache Tovmasyan), and one Russian thug, Igor (Yura Borisov), to round up the newlyweds and annul the union. An Armenian Orthodox priest, Toros is literally summoned in the middle of a baptism, suggesting money always comes before God. The job proves more difficult than expected, however, when Ivan flees, going on a bender of strip clubs, sort of the idiot son’s version of running away home. His jilted wife and his peeved pursuers, then, form an unlikely quartet, at once aligned and in opposition, chasing Ivan across Brooklyn as a “Pretty Woman”-like fantasy recalibrates as a black-hearted comedy.

Indeed, though “Anora” is an independent, it often feels transplanted from Hollywood’s Golden Age, like 90 years ago this might have been a vehicle for Mae West. There is a distinct screwball energy to the chase scenes, in ways both big and small, in the out-and-out angry desperation effused by Karragulianas as Toros, and in the dumplings Garnik uses to nurse a wound in lieu of ice. Yet, at the same time, Baker’s editing is not always fast-paced, lingering on the real menace in the air, as in the sequence where Garnik and Igor try to corral the scrappy Ani. It’s deliberately and effectively unsettling; I kept laughing and then I kept feeling guilty for laughing.

Ultimately, though, “Anora” is not quite as difficult nor revelatory as these tangled sensations would suggest. True, there is something moving in the emergent Alice/Uncas like relationship of Ani and Igor, two physical laborers in their respective ways, proletariats under the thumb of the bourgeoisie. But the class commentary is not as nimbly sewn into the plot as a Golden Age comedy and what’s more never cuts all that deep, as obvious as the divide between Ani’s house beneath the train tracks and Ivan’s on the water. When Toros gives a maid a bigger-than-usual tip to clean up Ivan’s bigger-than-usual mess, the capping shot of the maid is as funny as it is revealing, the movie itself treating her as Toros does, uninterested in her plight, abandoning her just as he does.

“Anora” is not uninterested in Ani’s plight, obviously, it’s front and center, but it also never entirely brings her to life. Madison’s performance is lively, often incredibly so, but that is not quite the same thing. And by rendering “Anora” so plot-forward, Baker essentially yokes his characters to it, rarely stopping to have them explicate ideas or thoughts, meaning that any sense of character is what the actors bring. Maybe that’s less important with the secondary people but it’s a significant flaw where Ani is concerned. And for all of Madison’s energy, who Ani truly is and how she feels is much less clear, underlined in how we never quite know if she’s really in love with Ivan and going after him on blind faith, or if she’s hoping to ultimately play his family for a big payday. Maybe she doesn’t know herself, but if so, that inner struggle does not emerge, and it means what would be an utterly brutal punch of a denouement only half-connects. 

A Wholly Debatable (Un)Definitive Ranking of Star Trek Movies

Reflecting the weird state of our cinematic present, the 14th “Star Trek” movie, “Star Trek: Section 31” (is this like “Leonard Part 6?”), was released in January. Made specifically for the Paramount + streaming network, it is billed as a television movie, like “Murder by Moonlight,” though calling a movie released to streaming a television movie makes me think of the co-owner of the pizza place where I worked in high school when I asked him whether he thought the peanut butter or the jelly was more important in a PB&J: “What the hell’s the difference?” Indeed. And though I have more of a history with “Star Trek” then you might think in so much as my mom used to watch reruns of the original “Star Trek” show on the little monochrome TV in our kitchen that typically aired before dinner, I am no Trekkie, not even close, a needle starting at zero going the other way, to quote Neil McCauley, the legendary thief who probably never even knew who Gene Roddenberry was. And yet, if many others ranked “Star Trek” movies in light of “Section 31,” why couldn’t I? My list may not be valuable, nor enlightening, and definitely not necessary, God no, but it could be interesting, or at the very least, infuriating. And besides, do you want to read another Oscar take this morning about who should host or what should have won or what it all means and what in the world was Timothée Chalamet thinking with that yellow suit, or do you want to read a Nicole Kidman and Jean Harlow fan rank “Star Trek” movies? That’s what I thought.

A Wholly Debatable (Un)Definitive Ranking of Star Trek Movies

12/13. Star Trek: Nemesis / Star Trek Beyond (2002, 2016). The two I haven’t seen. That rules me out of order, I know, but this whole list is out of order. 

11. Star Trek: Insurrection (1998). I have seen this one, but I confess, I cannot recall a single thing about it.

10. Star Trek Into Darkness (2013). The main problem, as I see it, and this is true of its 2009 predecessor (see below) too, which I still rather liked, is that Chris Pine is doing a better James T. Kirk in “Into the Woods” than he’s doing in “Star Trek.”

 

9. Star Trek Generations (1994). The whole thing with Kirk and Picard just never felt right. Like Coverdale/Page. 

8. Star Trek III: The Search for Spock (1984). Most notable for being Kramer’s favorite “Star Trek” movie. 

 
7. Star Trek: The Motion Picture (1979). I always admired this one for zigging right outta the gate, but still, the inaugural “Star Trek” movie one is a little too much like 2005, the spiritual sequel between “2001” and “2010.”

6. Star Trek: First Contact (1996). I don’t have time to do the research, and I wouldn’t even be sure where to begin if I did, but there must be some sort of corollary between “Star Trek” enjoyed by non-Trekkies and John Kay & Steppenwolf appearing on the soundtrack.

5. Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan (1982). Unlike Kramer this was Jerry’s preferred “Star Trek” movie, and I can see that, but also, see #2 where I elaborate a bit more.

4. Star Trek (2009). J.J. Abrams’s aesthetic eventually wore out its welcome and exposed its limitations which means this reboot now stands as the definitive expression of his doing-125-in-a-65 but somehow holding it all together style, highlighted by literalizing a nostalgia trip, recalling a more innocent, amusing age of fan service.   

3. Star Trek V: The Final Frontier (1989). This is insane, I know, but hear me out. Because while the 2009 reboot was very much J.J. Abrams’s movie, the truest auteur movie in the “Star Trek” canon is “The Final Frontier,” a vainglorious calamity made entirely in the image of its director, which is why I cannot help but sort of love it. 

2.Star Trek VI: The Undiscovered Country (1991). Ricardo Montalban was legitimately moving as Kahn, but I confess, I prefer Christopher Plummer more blatantly having fun as General Chang. Plummer channels his character’s penchant for Shakespeare into a Shakespearean kind of performance, casting the Klingon Court in the light of the Globe Theatre, not breaking the fourth wall in the traditional sense but somehow allowing us to feel as if we are in his presence and he in ours, nevertheless. Plus, Iman as the greatest of all Kirk love interests because she brings a little diva energy opposite the biggest diva of ‘em all.

1.Star Trek IV: The Voyage Home (1986). It is the greatest sci-fi screwball comedy ever made, and with a green message to boot. What’s not to love? 

That green message reminds me how I was recently reminded of William Shatner’s real trip to space aboard Businessman Jeff Bezos’s Blue Origin space shuttle in 2021. Variety published an excerpt a year later from Shatner’s book reflecting on that voyage, how he was overcome in “being confronted with the knowledge of further destruction of Earth at our hands.” I do not doubt the sincerity of his feelings, nor the feelings of other space travelers who have experienced the so-called Overview Effect, but boy, talk about a cosmic kind of As a Father of Daughters moment. I was struck with my own sadness at the thought of people having to go all the way to space to grasp the preciousness of Earth. If all 8 billion people down here have to go all the way up there to get it, what hope do we have? In fact, it brings to mind DeForest Kelley’s incredulous observation in “Star Trek IV:” “You mean I have to die to discuss your thoughts on death?”