Harlan Ellison's Watching

by Harlan Ellison

  Mr. Coppola's comedy of awakening sexuality and the loss of innocence in Big City U.S.A. is straight Catcher in the Rye derivative, by way of a castrated Tom Sawyer. The words precious, artsy-craftsy, overblown and juicy come to mind. The color is overwhelming.

  There is little fresh or innervating in either the screenplay or the attack of this film. It covers ground so heavily tilled the best that can be harvested is corn. Yet audiences leap and bubble for it. I think the phenomenon is a sad one. Films such as 10:30 PM Summer and Mickey One and even in an alarming number of instances Blow-Up are regarded by an American cinemagoing audience with suspicion, hostility and outright confusion, while such films as this, The Russians Are Coming! The Russians Are Coming! and The Fortune Cookie touch the proper nerve-endings and are rewarded with accolades. They are the common denominator films. They are the idiot comedies, in which no one demonstrates a modicum of intelligence, perspicacity or style. They demand nothing of the viewer. They are merely palatable.

  That You're a Big Boy Now! is so popular is strident testimony to the accusation that we have become a movie-viewing nation of systematically corrupted taste.

  To this echoing tune, Coppola has added his own personal contrapuntal variation. I will not belabor the point nor enumerate the tedious twirls of the plot that compel me to this conclusion, save in remarking that any film that casts Julie Harris as a character named "Miss Thing" is so obviously slanted for the cute and cuddly that it cannot be considered seriously.

  Since the film is entirely the work of Coppola, all blame must be laid at his talent. I have heard Mr. Coppola speak on several occasions, stating his thesis of filmwriting, and he makes no secret of the fact that he will write hack in an effort to produce "quality" films of his own design. Mr. Coppola "hacked" on such monumental atrocities as Is Paris Burning? and This Property Is Condemned and so by action/reaction we should expect a "quality" film of his own vision to be as spectacularly good as the hacks were bad. But we get more of the same, except on a slightly smaller scale.

  Rip Torn and Geraldine Page are hideously miscast, and their posturings in parts of little more than imbecile caricature are painful to witness. Elizabeth Hartman doesn't really have the kind of legs needed to wear miniskirts. Michael Dunn is wearing awfully thin indeed, not to mention grating. And poor Peter Kastner, who has some stuff going for him, is weltered down in a quagmire of nonsense and random murmurings that make him appear to be little more than a bifocaled epileptic. Tony Bill . . . well, the less said the better.

  And all of that pseudo-Resnais walking through the streets of Manhattan, culminating in a 1930s off-into-the-sunset being dragged by a slobbering nitwit of a dog, was more treacle than my doctors will allow me to consume.

  The only saving grace of the film is the brilliant and youthful score by John Sebastian of The Lovin' Spoonful. The songs are memorable, they capture the mood that Coppola may have intended but thoroughly failed to inject into his film, and they are well worth going to hear. But as I said in a recent record review of the soundtrack album, the Spoonful's music is so good it shucks one into believing the film has merit, when in truth it is roughly akin to having a Rolls Royce grill braised onto the front of an Edsel.

  Written 1966, previously unpublished

  AUTHOR'S FOOTNOTE, 1988:

  The motorist who has been driving erratically and at excessive speeds for years, flouting the law and endangering others, who finally gets pulled over by the Highway Patrol and is ticketed, complains at the injustice because this time s/he really didn't do anything wrong. There is, however, a kind of cosmic justice at work. The insensate universe struggling toward some kind of balance. It is, how shall we view it . . . fair. In a cockeyed way. Publication, at last, of this piece I wrote in 1966 is similarly . . . fair. It is a genuinely dopey review. Apart from the sterling ineptitude I demonstrated here, by managing not to review the film at all—can you figure out what the movie is about?—I was dense enough not to perceive any value whatever in the early efforts of Coppola. Somewhere in the latter section of this book, I go off my chump completely and say something like, "I have loved every foot of film Coppola has ever shot." Never having had this earlier piece published, I was able to get away with the panegyric. Unlike politicians running for office, whose sophomoric plagiarisms in college are dredged up to throw mud on their character twenty years later, I got away with it. I can no longer live with the guilt! I was shortsighted and seven kinds of a dolt. Which is not to say that You're a Big Boy Now! is much better a film than I said it was (time has not been kind to it, as verified by a recent Late Show tv viewing). I blow the whistle on myself (the slaphappy tone of all this being merely a surface candy-coating) as part of an ongoing need to keep my "credentials" credible. I've written elsewhere about the imperatives of an essayist having no guilty secrets. No matter how small. The urgency of confessional writing. It is the pathological dedication to being non-blackmail able. Especially by oneself. The parallel most applicable, in my experience, is this: once upon a time not that long ago, I was a guest on a national tv talk show. The host is a man whose name is common coin in households where Kafka, Conrad, Paul Muni and Sojourner Truth are unknown. In the course of his oncamera "conversation" with me, I became aware of an animus toward me and what I was saying that perplexed me and seemed unmotivated by what we were actually talking about. I won't be more specific than that, but when next you and I get together, I'll play the videocassette of the show, and you'll see what I mean. It was easily the most awful of the hundreds of such talk show encounters I've had in the last twenty years. And it perplexed me, the more intensely each time I re-ran that tape to attempt some penetration of the mystery. It was not until a friend of the host—whom I met some time later, and with whom I discussed this matter—let me in on the Secret Agenda. Which was that the host is both a seriously practicing Catholic and a practicing homosexual intent on staying in the closet. Understand: neither of these aspects of the man's life, in my view, is a topic for discussion or the judgment of others. Neither as an Atheist nor as a heterosexual do I think being Catholic or gay is something to hide. But in the public spotlight, it is obvious why he feels the need to protect his privacy. And as a result of the ongoing cultural prejudices against either or both of these life-choices, can you imagine the hell in which he dwells every day? He has to pretend to be straight, lest he suffer the hellfire of his religion; and he has to conceal both from a viewing audience that might well become less enamored of him. And because of this need to keep his secrets, his on-camera attitudes toward many guests and many philosophical positions become tortured, even warped in their logic. He is, sadly, innocently and tormentedly, a man who self-censors because he is blackmailable. In protecting his "guilty secrets," which in a sane world would produce neither guilt nor opprobrium, he produces "work," i.e., conversation, that is dishonest. For a writer, such guilty secrets can be crippling. The more one has to conceal about oneself, the more often one shies away from writing the burning truth about those dangerous areas, either consciously or unconsciously. The only way to insure that the writer goes as close to the fire as s/he can, is to hold nothing back, to tell it all, to reveal one's pimply ass to the world. This is considered suspect in many literary circles, and at least an act of gauche tastelessness. In England, for instance, when my short story collections are published, the UK. editors insist that the introductions and sometimes the foreword be dropped. On the well-founded belief that such revelations of personal involvement with the fiction will offend critics and even readers. I've ceased arguing with them, having indeed suffered scathing negative reviews from English critics who spent the bulk of their copy on what an impertinent self-server I am, without spending much copy actually addressing the quality of the stories. Nonetheless, I believe to my shoe-tops that it is imperative for my "credentials" that I try to conceal nothing that will compel me to slide past a difficult subject. I am as weak and as strong in this respect as you, and I know how easily our species twists reality
to make ourselves look good. As Olin Miller has written: "Of all liars, the smoothest and most convincing is memory." (Miller also said, "Writing is the hardest way of earning a living, with the possible exception of wrestling alligators," but that's quite another matter.) So I try not to give myself the opportunity of concealing even the few personal flaws that are not enormous enough for the most casual reader to perceive without a road map. This rambling footnote—size 20 triple-E by this time—thus goes directly to that auctorial policy. You might never remember, by the time you get to my praise of Coppola later in these pages, that at age thirty-two, more than twenty-two years ago, I wrote such a dippy analysis of one of the great film directors. But you might; and if you didn't, I would.

  This is why murderers who've gotten away with it for a lifetime suddenly rush into a police station to confess.

  BEAU GESTE

  Universal's re-remake of Beau Geste, the venerable P. C. Wren tale of derring-do and swashbucklery at Fort Zinderneuf, will no doubt be summarily dismissed by the "serious" critics of cinema, both here and abroad. Such dismissal is not entirely unjustified. It is a well that has long-since run dry. But in the interests of fair play and offbeat comments guaranteed to startle, this reviewer would like to dwell on four points. Perhaps someone will take note.

  First. This started out as a well-done version of the hoary old story of the brothers who wind up in the command of a sadistic Foreign Legion sergeant. It was a gratuitously emasculated version of the original story, done brilliantly not once, but twice before. One entire brother was omitted, the theft of the jewel was omitted, plot twists were omitted en masse. But nonetheless, it held the interest. It was nicely mounted. Until Doug McClure walked on the screen. Everyone in the theater laughed. Now before there is instant assumption that I am going to pan McClure, let me assure the readership that he performed more than adequately. He did all that could be done with the part doled out to him, a role whose dimensions were as vast as the horizon line in Bosnia. But McClure was laughed at. People smiled as he tended the sick brother lying in his bunk. They snickered and found the corners of their mouths turning up. It ruined the mood of the story. The reason for this unrestrained mirth contains a key to the senseless casting currently being done at Universal, and it contains a dire warning to either Mr. McClure or his agent, since his studio obviously cannot see what is right in front of them.

  McClure is the most natural, most certain, most exquisite comedic talent to come along since Cary Grant grew gray in the service. He is what Rod Taylor has tried to be, what James Garner has failed miserably at being, what Tony Randall grows too raucous really ever to be, what Jack Lemmon does very well indeed. He is a funny man. A handsome, athletic, all-around leading man with a built-in laughmaker. When McClure walks onscreen, people sit up and want to laugh. To cast him in deadly serious roles where his grimacing and Superman good looks are incongruous is in the nature of a capital crime.

  Had Universal one whit the intelligence they pretend to possess, they would launch McClure instantly in a series of big-budget sophisticated comedies, sit back and rake in the dividends. A word to the wise . . .

  Second. The film inevitably falls before the derision of the audience, because it is fifty years out-of-date. It devolves on points of "old school tie" honor, of stiff-necked patriotism to hollow causes, of the sort of "into the valley of death" horse manure no audience of 1966 is going to accept. Not when they are faced full daily with a dirty, and some say immoral, war on the front pages of their newspapers. No one is going to accept the nobility of dying in the saddle (a scene Leslie Nielsen, who is far better than that, should have refused to play) when they can see newsphotos of bombed-out schools and churches with innocent civilians napalmed and disemboweled. No one really believes, any longer, that war is noble, that the esprit de corps is excuse for atrocity and stupidity and following atrocious, stupid rules of combat. Which brings us inescapably to the most important point about this film, which is

  Third. The practice—often lamented in these pages—of remaking films that were made as classics originally. Stagecoach, She, Room for One More, Mutiny on the Bounty, Rashomon, and now Beau Geste: each of these was made the first time out as well as it could ever be made. Each has had a new edition released in the last few years and each one, without exception, has been an artistic disaster. The strangling stench of venality behind these remakes is so gagging that only the horse-blindered producers who have fostered them could hope to accept the hypocrisy of their being brought into being. And only these same men could hope to swallow the rationalizations used to ballyhoo weak excuses for their latest incarnations.

  If the film industry does not stop this ceaseless, senseless cannibalization of its own body, it will disenchant the filmgoing audience beyond hope of recall. How much longer can audiences be expected to swallow the patent lies of four-color lithography and slanted Coming Attractions? How much longer can people be expected to invest their trust, their ticket money, their time and their sense of wonder in shabby redone warhorses butchered by second-rate visionaries? What dreadful ghouls imagine they can match the marvels wrought for us first time out by Kurosawa, Ford, Laughton, Gable, John Wayne or Thomas Mitchell? What front-office callousness can be deemed even remotely acceptable for the production of inferior versions of treasured classics held dear in memory by movie lovers; films whose discovery by younger generations has been irrevocably lost or mutilated by the release of witless surrogates, merely for the money to be gained from a shameful resort to the reputation of the former version?

  It is a disgrace the industry continues to flaunt in the faces of cinemaphiles who have deplored it for many years.

  And fourth. Sympathy is herewith extended to Nielsen, McClure, Guy Stockwell, Telly Savalas and a fine supporting cast, who have been made to play a microcephalically written screenplay of sheerest ineptitude. The clichés roll off the typewriter of this film's Phantom Author like squares of toilet paper.

  There are few excuses suitable for a scenarist who has turned out a script of this caliber. If he is a wise man he will spread the rumor that he was hammerstunned drunk throughout the entire period of scripting. In which case someone ought to offer him a better grade of panther sweat.

  Cinema / December 1966

  UP THE DOWN STAIRCASE

  It certainly didn't begin with Mr. Luce and his bogus posed photograph of "beatniks in their natural habitat"—nor even with Harriet Beecher Stowe's fraudulent Uncle Tom's Cabin, purporting to be the gospel on how it was for de darkie way down South—but it was that particular Lucely manifestation of yellow journalism that surely brought it to its fullest flowering. (And he's still at it; a recent issue of Time features a ghastly slanted takeout on the hippies, once again ornamented by posed photographs purporting to be accurate representations of the hippie life and ethic, and are no more representative than Mamie Van Doren is representative of the Average American Housewife.)