Saint Jack (1979)

Peter Bogdanovich’s Saint Jack, based on Paul Theroux’s novel, came out in 1979. Because of Bogdanovich’s insistence on having Ben Gazzara play the lead role rather than a big name star major studios wouldn’t touch the movie (they wanted Paul Newman) so it ended up being made by New World Pictures with Roger Corman himself producing.

My reaction to this movie is very similar to my reaction to Bogdanovich’s earlier The Last Picture Show (1971). I can see what Bogdanovich is trying to do and I think he succeeds in doing it, but I’m just not necessarily particularly interested in the result.

This is a deep dive into squalor, moral corruption and nihilism.

Jack Flowers (Gazzara) is an American expatriate in Singapore in 1973. He runs a whorehouse but he wants his own whorehouse. This gets him into a lot of trouble. He befriends a seedy English expatriate, William Leigh (Denholm Elliott).

Jack has a girlfriend but she no plays no part whatsoever in the story.

Jack falls foul of gangsters. He then goes into business with the smooth but creepy Eddie Schuman (played by Bogdanovich himself). It’s never explicitly stated but we assume Eddie is CIA. He’s certainly involved in the kinds of sleazy illegal immoral activities we would expect from a CIA agent.

Jack gets to manage a huge brothel for the CIA and is persuaded to engage in some political blackmail.

Not much really happens. It’s that kind of movie.

There are really only two characters with even the slightest amount of depth, Jack and William.

We get no backstory at all on any of the characters. For me that’s one of the movie’s biggest strengths. I prefer movies in which a character’s personality is slowly revealed through their actions, rather than having it explained to the viewer.

In this case we learn almost nothing about Jack except that he’s a loser drifting through life. I can see why Bogdanovich wanted Gazzara rather than Paul Newman. Gazzara has zero charisma, which suited Bogdanovich’s purposes.

At the end we get a hint that Jack is a loser but he isn’t a louse, but then we knew that from the beginning from the fact that he treats his whores kindly and is as honest as you can be while being a criminal.

Denholm Elliott is always fun to watch but William remains an enigma.

I assume that that was Bogdanovich’s intention. Jack and William are both empty shells.

There is perhaps a very slight Graham Greene flavour - European expatriates slowly subsiding into moral corruption and despair.

On the audio commentary Bogdanovich tells us that most of the smaller roles were played by non-actors and much of the dialogue was improvised. I have never understood why some directors like doing this. You usually end up with a movie that is rather flat, and that’s the case here. Since the movie is also too long the whole thing drags quite badly in places. It lacks energy. But then that might have been the director’s intention - to emphasise the hopelessness and emptiness.

Singapore in this movie is a city of the damned. A city of degradation and violence, a city of whores, gangsters and corrupt cops. All of the European expatriates know they should go home but perhaps they can’t because they know they serve their damnation.

Is there a chance that Jack might have a chance of achieving redemption? You’ll have to watch the movie to find out.

The Vietnam War plays a background role, with American servicemen on rest and recreation leave heading straight for the brothels. It’s as if the East is corrupting the West at the same time as the West is corrupting the East. The only thing that could make things worse would be for the CIA to show up, which they do.

I didn’t exactly enjoy this movie but there are plenty of interesting aspects to it. It’s an odd emotionally distanced movie.

It was a box office flop. Bogdanovich made these odd movies that as his career progressed seemed increasingly to alienate both audiences and critics. He didn’t quite fit comfortably into the New American Cinema mould. Most directors of that period would have succumbed to the temptation to insert a crude political message into Saint Jack but Bogdanovich is more interested in social alienation than politics. He wasn’t predictable enough. After Paper Moon he had a whole string of flops, including Daisy Miller which I personally think is a superb movie.

Despite its flaws and quirks Saint Jack is worth seeing. Recommended.

The Last Picture Show (1971)

The Last Picture Show was Peter Bogdanovich’s second feature film and it launched him, briefly, as a superstar director.

This is a coming-of-age movie set in a tiny rapidly declining Texas town named Anarene. It begins in 1951.

Sonny Crawford (Timothy Bottoms) and Duane Jackson (Jeff Bridges) are about to graduate from high school, along with Sonny’s girl Charlene and Duane’s girl Jacy (Cybill Shepherd). Sam the Lion (Ben Johnson) owns the pool hall, the cafe and movie theatre. There’s nothing else in Anarene worth owning. He’s a kind of mentor to Sonny and Duane.

In Anarene once you graduate from high school life is over. Duane eventually gets a job on an oil rig. That’s the most any male in Anarene can aspire to - well-paid manual labour. The girls have no aspirations. They will drift into marriage with losers.

Except Jacy. She at least has some dim notion that getting the hell out of Anarene would be a good idea. She knows that all she has going for her is that she’s pretty and men want to get into her pants. She’s a wannabe femme fatale but she doesn’t have the imagination to set her sights high enough and she isn’t smart enough and devious enough. She’s aiming to land a guy from Wichita Falls. To Jacy Wichita Falls is the Big City of a girl’s dreams, but the rich folks from Wichita Falls are only marginally less hopeless than the folks of Anarene.

Sonny dumps Charlene because after a year of going steady she won’t even let him put his hand up her skirt. He drifts into a futile affair with the middle-aged (Ruth Popper), the wife of the high school’s football coach. Nothing works out for any of the characters and they all end up more miserable than they were at the start. That’s the movie.

I can see what Bogdanovich is trying to do - showing us the futile squalid lives of losers in a loser town. He certainly succeeds. At times I do however get the feeling that this is one of those movies in which urban intellectuals express their fear and loathing of rural America. I definitely get the feeling that Bogdanovich despises his characters. Perhaps I’m being unfair. Perhaps he was aiming for Tragedy. This could have been a good setup for a film noir but that’s not what Bogdanovich is shooting for. My suspicion is that he’s aiming for an art film.

Bogdanovich has made some aesthetic choices that are clearly very deliberate. It’s not just that the movie is shot in black-and-white. It’s shot in such a way as to drain the life out of everything. The landscape looks like a post nuclear apocalyptic wasteland. Robert Surtees was a great cinematographer so the lifeless feel was obviously not a mistake - it was deliberate.

The town looks like it’s waiting to die. The pool hall, cafe and movie theatre are the social and cultural hubs of the town. There’s nothing else. The pool hall looks completely derelict. The cafe and movie theatre look semi-derelict. The hero drives an ancient beat-up pickup truck.

The boys dress like losers.

The women are all dowdy. Not because they’re unattractive but because they have allowed themselves to look dowdy. They look defeated. Even Jacy, the closest thing the town has to a glamour babe, is totally lacking in glamour. This was Cybill Shepherd at the peak of her hotness. Jacy is a very pretty girl but she has no idea how to make the most of herself. She doesn’t know how to do her hair or makeup. She doesn’t know how to dress. And this is 1951, a time when women’s fashions were very glamorous.

It has a similar feel to those British kitchen sink dramas of the early 60s in which the working class protagonists learn that there is no hope and nothing to look forward to. There’s no point in thinking about sex - that will just lead to degradation and misery. No point thinking about love - the only person likely to fall in love with you is another loser. The best thing you can do is just throw yourself under a bus and get it over with. This movie takes the same approach to small town America. The luckiest character in the movie is the guy who gets squashed by a cattle truck. His suffering is at least over.

Not a single character in this movie gets even the smallest amount of joy from sex.

I strongly suspect that this movie was a box office hit because it quickly gained the reputation of being a dirty movie. Cybill Shepherd cavorting nude in a swimming pool! I also suspect that that’s why critics doted on it. They approved of its open treatment of sex. It made critics feel like they were watching a European at film (you know, those subtitled movies where the actresses take their clothes off). At the time American movies were very tentatively exploring the possibility of dealing with sex in a grown-up way.

And The Last Picture Show was definitely raunchy by 1971 standards - lots of nudity, frontal nudity, sex scenes, open discussion of sex. It’s interesting to compare it to Klute, a Hollywood movie released in the very same year that also deals with subject matter. Klute seems very tame by comparison. A brief blink-and-you’ll-miss-it glimpse of Jane Fonda’s nipples and that’s about it. So it’s easy to see why The Last Picture Show attracted interest from the public and from critics.

Timothy Bottoms gives the dullest performance in the history of cinema. The other cast members do their best. Cybill Shepherd is by far the best thing in the movie.

I find it difficult to stay interested in a movie that includes not a single characters I can care about. I can be captivated by a movie featuring only unsympathetic characters if they’re rotten in interesting ways.

I can see why critics adored this movie. It’s miserable, nihilistic and filled with loathing for small town America. Critics like that kind of thing. In 1971 it was just what they had been hoping for. This is Serious Filmmaking. I intensely disliked every minute of it.

Daisy Miller (1974)

Peter Bogdanovich’s Daisy Miller came out in 1974 and pretty much wrecked his career. He had just had three major hits one after the other, What’s Up Doc?, The Last Picture Show and Paper Moon. He was seen as a bit of a bumptious upstart. He compounded his sins by casting his new girlfriend Cybill Shepherd in the lead role. And Daisy Miller was a very ambitious rather cerebral rather arty movie. Critics were only too happy to plunge their knives into him.

This movie also damaged Cybill Shepherd’s carer. Critics savaged her performance. One can’t help feeling that many critics were excessively hard on her merely because she was Bogdanovich’s girlfriend - it was a case of guilt by association (in much the same way as the trashing of Geena Davis’s career was collateral damage when critics went after Renny Harlin for Cutthroat Island).

In the case of Cybill Shepherd in Daisy Miller it was also a classic case of an actress giving exactly the performance her director wanted from her and then being savaged by critics for her trouble.

It’s easy to see why Daisy Miller bombed at the box office. It was out of step with public tastes in 1974. It’s also a movie that requires at least a very vague understanding of the social mores of the past. And it’s a movie that requires the audience to be fully engaged - it’s a subtle movie with some very subtle touches and those subtle touches are very important. And it is an art movie. It was just not a movie that was going to please a mass audience.

This is a story about misunderstandings and misjudgments and misinterpretations, all of which can add up and lead to very unfortunate consequences.

Daisy Miller (Cybill Shepherd) is a young girl from a nouveau riche American family doing the Grand Tour in Europe. In Switzerland she meets Frederick Winterbourne (Barry Brown). He’s American as well but he was educated in Europe. He understands the rules of respectable society. That doesn’t mean he’s respectable. We learn that he has just had an affair with a woman named Olga. But Frederick knows how to appear respectable and that’s what matters.

Daisy knows nothing of such social rules. She has not enjoyed the benefits of a good education. She simply ignores the rules. As a result she gives the impression of being vulgar and, even worse, she gives the impression that she might not be respectable. The crux of the story is whether Daisy really is innocent or not. Frederick fears that she may not be. In any case even though he is falling in love with her he is not going to take the risk of becoming entangled with a woman who is not respectable, or appears not to be respectable.

Daisy is obviously falling in love with Frederick but Frederick fails to understand this, as he fails to understand so many things.

This is a story of Americans in Europe, with American and European social mores being hopelessly incompatible, but it’s a bit more complicated that. It’s vital to bear in mind always that Daisy’s family are nouveau riche Americans. Blue-bloods, upper-class Americans, could adapt much more easily to European mores. But Daisy’s family have zero comprehension of the social mores of late 19th century Europe. They have no idea why they shock people.

Winterbourne’s family are Americans who have become totally acclimatised to European society. They are perfectly at ease in European society. They understand the social rules and they follow them. They have become so Europeanised that they no longer understand Americans like Daisy.

While some viewers might think the dialogue is anachronistic it was in fact mostly lifted directly from the 1879 Henry James novella. Some viewers might also think that some of Daisy’s behaviour is anachronistic but the movie follows the James story very very closely. Bogdanovich did not make this stuff up and Henry James did not make it up either. Henry James, as a 19th century American who lived in Europe, would have been very familiar with the social mores of the time among Europeans, among upper-class Americans and among nouveau riche Americans. Daisy Miller is not a fantasy creation. Such girls certainly existed.

It needs to be emphasised that both James and Bogdanovich are sympathetic to Daisy. She is certainly vulgar and uncultured but she’s honest and open. Winterbourne is a less sympathetic character. He is imprisoned by his prejudices which causes him to hopelessly misinterpret Daisy’s behaviour. He is also imprisoned by his fear of scandal. He loves Daisy but to marry her would be a huge social risk. But Winterbourne is not a villain. In his own way he is a tragic figure.

Cybill Shepherd understood exactly the performance the part required. She’s terrific. She's just right. Barry Brown is equally perfect as Winterbourne.

The visual approach of the movie is both subtle and ambitious. Bogdanovich pulls off some stunningly complex long takes with mirrors everywhere and he’s not being gimmicky. Seeing Daisy reflected in mirrors works - Winterbourne is never really able to see Daisy just as she is. He sees her reflected though his prejudices and his misinterpretations. But Bogdanovich is never showy for the sake of being showy.

Henry James has never been the easiest of writers to adapt to film. His fondness for irony and ambiguity are not easy to translate to the screen. Daisy Miller is not, as some critics have claimed, just a bold attempt that failed to come off. It does come off. It’s not a partial success. It’s a success. It’s a wonderful movie and it’s very highly recommended.

The Kino Lorber Blu-Ray looks great and Bogdanovich’s audio commentary is very worthwhile. There’s also an interview with Cybill Shepherd. Both Bogdanovich and Shepherd remained extremely proud of this movie, and rightly so.