Tales of Hoffmann (1951)

Tales of Hoffmann is the Michael Powell-Emeric Pressburger film of Jacques Offenbach's 1881 opera The Tales of Hoffmann, which was based on three of the wonderful short stories of E. T. A. Hoffmann.

But this statement needs to be qualified and amplified a great deal. Powell and Pressburger did not simply film the opera. They adapted and altered it significantly. Opera is the most deliberately and consciously artificial of all art forms and the most uncompromisingly theatrical. Making a movie that is artificial and aggressively non-realist is no problem but opera is artificial and theatrical in a very non-cinematic way. And if you remove the artifice and the theatricality then you have removed the very heart and soul of opera. So how do you make an opera into a feature film?

Powell and Pressburger adopted a bold radical approach. Their first crucial insight is that yes this is opera but it’s a movie. There’s no need to cast actual opera singers. Why not cast actors and dancers, and have their singing voices dubbed by real opera singers? In fact the entire movie was shot as a silent film with every element of the soundtrack post-dubbed. This allowed Powell and Pressburger to use a lot of silent film techniques. They were much influenced by German Expressionism.

This also allowed Powell and Pressburger to pull off three casting strokes of genius. Moira Shearer had been a sensation in their 1948 masterpiece The Red Shoes. She couldn’t sing. But she was a magnificent dancer, so her singing voice was dubbed. And they were able to cast the great Australian ballet dancer Sir Robert Helpmann. He couldn’t sing either but again no problem. Not only could Helpmann dance, he was a very competent actor and he had extraordinary screen presence. And he had that amazing face. Once the makeup people were let loose on him he could become sinister, monstrous, comical, grotesque - whatever Powell and Pressburger wanted him to be. And Ludmilla Tchérina has breathtaking screen charisma.

Being able to cast dancers rather than singers allowed Powell and Pressburger to carry out their master plan - to create an extravaganza of music, images, dance and movement. A total artistic experience that was more than opera and more than straightforward cinema. Powell called it a “composed” film.

Casting dancers rather than singers gives the film a sense of dynamic movement and energy which would have been impossible otherwise. And choosing dancers such as Shearer, Helpmann and Ludmilla Tchérina who could act as well was another excellent idea.

Powell and Pressburger were totally and deliberately out of step with the mainstream of British cinema. With movies like Black Narcissus (1947) and The Red Shoes (1948) they had already been pushing the boundaries. They were in fact operating more in the realm of European art cinema. They were making films with more in common with stuff like Jean Cocteau’s surrealist masterpiece Beauty and the Beast (1946) and were already venturing into territory that Max Ophüls would explore in his 1950s masterworks like La Ronde, Le Plaisir and especially Lola Montès. Martin Scorsese (a huge fan of this movie) has also correctly pointed out the influence of Walt Disney’s Fantasia.

There are three separate stories. Hoffmann is the only character appearing in all three. In the first story he falls in love with a beautiful girl but she is in fact a mechanical doll. In the second tale Hoffmann falls in love with the courtesan Giulietta but she helps an evil magician (played with gusto by Robert Helpmann) to steal his reflection (and presumably his soul). In the third story Hoffmann is in love with the lovely soprano Antonia who is suffering from consumption. She must give up singing to save her life.

There’s also a framing story and Powell and Pressburger added a whole new sequence that was not in the opera - the Dragonfly ballet (scored by Sir Thomas Beecham who also conducts the orchestra throughout).

So what went wrong? The episodic nature of the film is a problem - with the framing story and the added Dragonfly ballet there are in effect five disconnected stories which dissipates any real emotional resonance. The film collapses under its own weight and at 136 minutes it is a bit of an ordeal. Apparently when it was shown at Cannes Alexander Korda told Powell and Pressburger that if they dropped the third segment, the Antonia story, it was a certainty that they would win the Golden Palm. They were unwilling to do this, and the movie missed out on that coveted prize. But Korda was right. It’s the weakest of the stories and it makes the movie way too long. On the other hand the Antonia sequence has a technical tour-de-force ending.

The Dragonfly ballet has no connection to the rest of the film but it’s a crucial part of the Powell-Pressburger plan to integrate image, music and dance. And it’s a fine showcase for Moira Shearer who was after all the movie’s biggest box-office drawcard.

The first sequence with Shearer as the mechanical doll Olympia has so much charm and wit and then we get that very unexpected ending.

It’s the second sequence, set in Venice concerning the courtesan Giulietta, that is the highlight. Here we have a sexy bad girl and Ludmilla Tchérina brings an unbelievably degree of sensuality, eroticism and decadence to her role. This sequence is wildly flamboyant and surreal and dream-like. It’s magnificent cinema.

This is a movie for hardcore cinephiles, filmmakers and devotees of cinematic experimentalism. The Blu-Ray includes an audio commentary with Martin Scorsese. He talks (delightfully) about his obsession with this film but it was clearly an obsession with its awe-inspiring technical virtuosity. For a young would-be filmmaker it provided boundless inspiration. I’m not sure a general audience was ever going to be able to embrace this movie to quite the same degree. It really is an exercise in technique. It doesn’t really have any emotional centre or anything likely to engage the interest of an ordinary movie-goer. It’s a movie to admire and to be dazzled by might be be heavy going if you’re not a devotee of opera and ballet.

Highly recommended for its originality and strangeness and for the glorious use of Technicolor. It’s insanely ambitious and despite its flaws it is in so many ways a triumph of cinematic art.

Rumble Fish (1983)

Francis Ford Coppola’s Rumble Fish was released in 1983. Audiences stayed away in droves. In the 80s Coppola was reinventing himself as the crazed visionary wild man of American cinema. This resulted in a series of spectacular box office failures.

It seems like it’s going to be a juvenile gang movie. Rusty James (Matt Dillon) leads a gang in Tulsa, Oklahoma. He’s about to face a showdown with a rival gang leader, Biff. During the fight his big brother (referred to throughout the film merely as The Motorcycle Boy and played by Mickey Rourke).

The Motorcycle Boy had left town suddenly and mysteriously a couple of years before. Rusty James idolised his big brother. Now he’s back and this sets up certain expectation in Rusty James, expectations which will be disappointed. The Motorcycle Boy had been a big shot. Rusty James assumes that he will now reassume his big shot status and lead the gang to glory in its battles with rival gangs.

Rather than doing this, The Motorcycle Boy broods mysteriously. He continues to brood mysteriously for the rest of the picture.

Their dad, played by Dennis Hopper, is an alcoholic loser. His wife, the mother of the two boys, walked out on him years ago and went to California (in this movie California is like a fabled land across the seas).

Rusty James has a girlfriend, Patty (Diane Lane). She’s a typical high school girl girl. Rusty James treats her with contempt.

The Motorcycle Boy keeps on brooding. Rusty James indulges himself in childish tantrums and self-pity. Nothing really happens until the ending which I guess we’re supposed to see as tragically inevitable.

Coppola also saw this as a movie about time. He does come up with some interesting ways to evoke the passage of time. But in this movie the passage of time is largely meaningless. At the beginning of the story Rusty James is violent, self-pitying and as dumb as a rock. By the end of the story he is violent, self-pitying and as dumb as a rock. At the beginning of the story The Motorcycle Boy is brooding mysteriously. By the end of the story we still have no idea what he was brooding about.

A story about a kid hero-worshipping a big brother had a personal resonance for Coppola since he had hero-worshipped his own big brother.

The movie is based on a novel by S.E. Hinton who also co-wrote the screenplay. It really does feel like a story written by a woman, a woman with zero understanding of men and zero interest in trying to understand them.

This was the golden age of Hollywood flops. Movies like Heaven’s Gate, Ishtar and Waterworld. Some of these - The Thing, Big Trouble in Little China, Cut-Throat Island, Hudson Hawk and Coppola’s own One from the Heart - were actually great movies and it’s difficult to see why they flopped. But it’s very easy to see why Rumble Fish flopped.

Coppola went to extraordinary lengths to ensure the film’s commercial failure. He shot it in black-and-white, which in 1983 made it impossible to market.

Stewart Copeland of The Police wrote the score. It’s jarring, discordant and bizarre. That’s apparently what Coppola wanted but it’s jarring, discordant and bizarre in a way that doesn’t fit the tone of the movie.

All of the characters are unlikeable losers. A movie about unlikeable losers can be fascinating if they’re unlikeable losers in interesting ways. But these people are irritating and uninteresting.

The Motorcycle Boy is clearly meant to be a mythic outsider figure. Coppola wanted Mickey Rourke to look like Camus so he clearly had a bit of an existentialist theme in mind - the Motorcycle Boy as a complete outsider totally detached from the world around him. That can work but it requires an actor with the right kind of charisma. It’s the sort of thing that Alain Delon could do effortlessly. Mickey Rourke just doesn’t have that charisma so he comes over as a dime-store would-be Camus.

It sounds like I’m doing a hatchet job on this movie but it does have its strengths. It looks extraordinary. At this point in his career Coppola had a knack for making movies that did not look like anyone else’s movies and did not feel like anyone else’s movies.

Everything about the way it’s shot, and especially the continual use of smoke that seems to come from nowhere, gives it an odd feeling of unreality. In a way that anticipates some of David Lynch’s later movies we’re given the impression that we’re not exactly in the world of everyday reality. At times it feels like a descent into Hell.

Rumble Fish is a failure but it’s an interesting failure.

Urban Cowboy (1980)

Urban Cowboy, released in 1980, is a movie in which a large part of the action takes place in a honky tonk. Not just a honky tonk, but the world’s biggest honky tonk. It’s Gilley’s in Pasadena Texas and it really existed and it really was the world’s biggest honky tonk.

In fact it’s a movie about the honky tonk. The original idea came from a magazine article about Gilley’s. Somehow or other paramount were persuaded to back such a movie. And it was shot on location at Gilley’s in Pasadena Texas.

It’s also a movie about a mechanical bull.

It’s the story about a cowboy who moves to the Big Smoke. Bud Davis (John Travolta) gets a job in a huge chemical plant. It’s dirty grimy factory work. Pasadena is a grimy industrial city. It’s a long way from home for a young cowpoke. The work is hard but at night there’s Gilley’s. Bud feels at home in Gilley’s. They play great country music. And it’s packed with cowboys (and cowgals) for whom it’s a taste of the world they really love, the world they really understand, the world of wide open spaces and horses and steers.

And there’s the mechanical bull. Which really was the thing that made the real life Gilley’s famous. Bud knows he has to ride that bull.

He meets Sissy (Debra Winger). She’s the kind of girl a cowboy dreams of marrying, a unspoilt down-home country girl, sweet but feisty. They fall in love and get married.

There’s a touching scene which could have been played for cruel mockery but it isn’t. Bud blindfolds Sissy and takes her to see the surprise he’s got for her. It’s a trailer. He’s made a downpayment on it. This will be their dream home. Sissy is over the moon. OK, it’s a trailer home, but it’s their home.

There’s a fly in the ointment, in the person of Wes Hightower (Scott Glenn). This movie is a kind of urban-set western and Wes is the equivalent of the sinister gunslinger who’s going to try to take Bud’s girl from him.

There are traumatic relationship dramas, with not just Sissy cheating on Bud with Wes but Bud cheating on her with Pam (Madolyn Smith Osborne). She’s a spoilt rich girl. Her daddy is a rich oil man but in a western she’d have been the daughter of a rich rancher.

And there’s the bull. Bud is obsessed by the bull. Sissy is obsessed by it as well. And there’s a mechanical bull riding contest with a prize of $5,000, a huge fortune for guys like Bud and Wes. In a western we’d be waiting for the climactic shootout but in this case it will be a climactic showdown in the form of this bull-riding contest.

The sexual connotations are very very obvious, with both Bud and Wes having to prove their manhood. And very obvious sexual connotations to Sissy’s obsession with riding the bull - she doesn’t do it to prove she’s as good as a man she does it because it turns her on.

John Travolta’s performance is the film’s biggest asset. Bud does some bad things but they’re comprehensible and Travolta ensures that Bud never loses our sympathy.

This was made not long after his star-making turn in Saturday Night Fever and the two movies have a lot in common - they’re sleazy and grungy and there’s plenty of despair and bleakness. Urban Cowboy is visually depressing but it’s deliberate. Pasadena Texas is not exactly picturesque. It’s a harsh mean urban landscape.

Debra Winger is very good also. The romantic dramas are believable. Bud and Sissy love each other but they’re too proud and stubborn to ask for forgiveness and we really do believe that that’s the kind of people they are.

The script resists the temptation to make Pam a straightforward Bad Girl. She has her character flaws as well but she’s a decent person and she does love Bud. But is her love as strong as Sissy’s?

If you love country music you’ll be in a state of bliss. There’s lots and lots of country music with performances by genuine country music greats like Bonnie Raitt and the Charlie Daniels Band.

Urban Cowboy was a moderate box office hit. It has some bleakness but some quirkiness as well and it has an engaging love story. Highly recommended.

The Only Game in Town (1970)

The Only Game in Town is a melodrama with some romantic comedy touches released by 20th Century Fox in 1970. It stars Elizabeth Taylor and Warren Beatty.

Fran Walker (Elizabeth Taylor) is a dancer in Vegas. She walks into a piano bar and gets chatted up by the piano player, Joe Grady (Warren Beatty). She’s lonely and they sleep together.

Each of them has a problem. Joe’s problem is gambling. He claims to have it under control. As soon as he has saved five thousand dollars he’s getting out of Vegas. But Joe is a gambler and while he can save money he can’t stop himself from gambling it away. For Joe getting out of Vegas is one of those things that seems like it’s just never going to happen.

Fran’s problem is her boyfriend Tom. He’s married. For five years he’s been promising Fran that he’ll divorce his wife and marry her. She’s given Tom an ultimatum, the latest of many. She hasn’t seen him for three months. For Fran marrying Tom is one of those things that seems like it’s just never going to happen.

Joe moves in with Fran. There’s no commitment. Each of them can just walk out of the relationship at any time. It’s not like it’s a big love affair. And they can’t make a commitment because any day now Joe will have that five grand and he’ll be off to New York, and any day now Tom will walk in and put an engagement ring on Fran’s finger.

Neither of them is going to admit to having fallen in love.

That’s pretty much the plot. The relationship is interesting and complex. We are told that Fran is three years older than Joe and in fact Taylor at 38 was a few years older than Beatty and that age difference is crucial to the story. Fran is obviously flattered that a good-looking younger man wants to get her into bed. Joe is an irresponsible overgrown boy. Fran finds herself mothering him. Joe is trying to deal with the fact that he’s found a woman he actually cares about.

Fran is desperately afraid of loneliness and she’s at the age where she can’t waste too much time on casual relationships. She’s afraid of losing Joe but she’s afraid of getting hurt if she makes a commitment. They both have some growing up to do.

I like the two central performances a great deal and the two leads have real chemistry. They play off each other amusingly and charmingly. They’re playing characters with very human weaknesses but Taylor and Beatty both make their characters sympathetic and likeable even when they’re doing exasperatingly foolish things.

The Only Game in Town was a spectacular box-office flop and ended the career of George Stevens as a director.

A large part of the problem is that this was 1970. Critics were wildly excited by the New American Cinema and by a new wave of young directors and stars who were going to revolutionise American movies. In the previous year Easy Rider and Midnight Cowboy came out. By comparison The Only Game in Town seemed very old-fashioned. George Stevens had been directing movies since 1933. This seemed like a movie that represented the glitz and glamour of 1950s Hollywood, the kind of old school movie that the New American Cinema was going to consign to the trash can.

Even worse, it has a definite 1950s melodrama feel. It has that 1950s major studio production polish. And critics had turned against Elizabeth Taylor. The whole Burton-Taylor celebrity circus thing hurt her career a good deal. In 1970 The Only Game in Town was inevitably going to be savaged by critics and ignored by the public.

Also counting against it was a hugely inflated budget. This should have been a modestly budgeted low-key intimate movie and as such would probably at least have broken even.

But classic movie fans today are less likely to be bothered by this movie’s old-fashioned feel. They’re more likely to see that as a plus. And old-fashioned melodramas have quite a following today.

Had this movie been released in the early 60s, around the time that movies like The World of Suzie Wong and Butterfield 8 were being made and Hollywood was tentatively moving towards grown-up movies about human relationships The Only Game in Town would probably have been hailed by critics as bold and daring. Timing is everything and the timing was wrong for this film in 1970.

It has to be said that Miss Taylor’s costumes are a major disaster and may have contributed to the dismissive attitudes towards the film.

I enjoyed The Only Game in Town. I’m going to recommend it.