A Left-Handed Form of Human Endeavour

I watched “Monster-In-Law” the other day for reasons I won’t go into here and, painfully awful as most of it was, it made me wish that Jane Fonda hadn’t spent fifteen years away from movies. In what is little but a pile of sentimental, toothless shite, she displays enough grace and charisma to blow J-Lo not only off the screen but off the planet. This made me think about Fonda and how she dominated the American screen for approximately ten years in a way which very few actresses have since managed - Meryl Streep perhaps and, for a short while, Jessica Lange.

Fonda did, of course, start as purest cheesecake and in later years attempted to persuade us that she was somehow manipulated into appearing in daft films like “Barbarella” but that never really washed. I think she was just an actress who wanted to make movies and wasn’t in a position to be picky. Once she was in such a position, she used it with an acuity that is just about unmatched in the history of American cinema. She certainly appeared in occasional duds during the 1970s - “Steelyard Blues” springs to mind - but most of them were at least interesting and ambitious. I can think of only one complete disaster which was cynical - the unbearable “Fun With Dick and Jane” - and even that must have looked like a potential winner, teaming her with George Segal, an actor who often brought out the best in his leading ladies.

But what Fonda very cleverly did was choose parts to match whatever image she wanted to present at a given time and reflect whichever issue was uppermost in her mind - and by extension, the mind of liberal America, Fonda being to movies what Jackson Browne was to music; a left-wing barometer of the times. What Fonda did mattered in a way that didn’t apply to, say, Redford or Newman. Even when she appeared in fluff like “California Suite”, she brought a sense of event to it. It’s hard to say when she lost this quality - perhaps when she was so comprehensively outclassed and outmanouvered by her co-stars in “9 to 5″.

Yet during the years that Fonda mattered, she never chose a better part than Bree Daniels in “Klute”. It brought her a well deserved Academy Award and remains, thirty five years later, her signature part. That’s not simply because she gives a great performance but because she is so detailed and truthful that her character takes over the film from the supposed main character - Donald Sutherland’s private detective Klute. In many ways, the film is a dead loss in terms of being a psycho-thriller - the identity of the killer is obvious from very early on and the detection is perfunctory - but as a character study of a woman on the edge, it’s world class. Everything that Fonda does is quirky and she’s often very funny but the overwhelming effect is one of terrible sadness. Bree is a woman without a centre, desperately searching for branch after branch to cling onto and when she finds someone who might offer her the stability she wants, she pushes him away. She suggests that women might have find their liberation but in doing so, might lose the things against which they define themselves.

“Klute” is a stunningly good piece of filmmaking, as it needs to be in order to contain such a phenomenal performance. Alan J. Pakula was near the beginning of his career in 1971 and his dark-hued, edgy style which became perhaps over-familiar still seems very fresh. There’s energy here and thoughtfulness, a combination which defined all of Pakula’s best films - the latter eventually overwhelmed the former in movies like “Presumed Innocent”. It also looks like nothing else thanks to Gordon Willis’ cinematography which captures the New York locations with a clarity that is often breathtaking and dares to go as dark as possible and then even darker.

Essentially, “Coma” is a film in which a prime example of innovative private enterprise is ruined by a pushy feminist who is too inqusitive for her own good and eventually has to be saved from certain eivsceration by Michael Douglas.

Well, that’s one way of looking at it and perhaps a more interesting one than regurgitating my best essay on paranoid cinema of the 1970s. Indeed, given Michael Crichton’s recent lurch to the compacent conservative Right in his fiction, he might be more sympathetic to such an interpretation than would have been the case in 1977. But I think the intention at the time was clearly meant to be progressive - exposing the practices of medicine in a capitalist system while telling a story with a strong female protagonist.

In some respects, this works quite well. Although the revelation that a hospital might induce coma in order to sell organs isn’t especially shocking or surprising, it’s a good hook for a conspiracy thriller and an interesting diversion from the old “government is trying to kill us” plot so common in the genre at the time. Indeed, following this we were encouraged to become paranoid about anything and everything - astronauts in “Capricorn One”, nuclear power in “The China Syndrome”, aliens in the godawful “Hangar 18″, religion in “Split Image”, adverts in “Looker”, bees in “The Swarm” and, er, piranha in “Piranha”.

There’s also a strong female protagonist in the shape of Genevieve Bujold, an excellent actress who hasn’t had a decent role for years. At least, she’s strong for about 100 minutes until the end when she begins to behave like one of the more cerebrally challenged contestants on “Big Brother” and has to be rescued by her boyfriend. But generally, she’s so plucky and likeable that she keeps the film going even when it descends into Saturday children’s matinee cliches and takes ten minutes to explain turns in the plot which we’ve grasped straightaway.

But it’s lively and sometimes exciting with Crichton showing a grasp of cinematic suspense which he subsequently demonstrated in the excellent “The Great Train Robbery” but lost very soon after - if you’ve seen “Looker” or “Physical Evidence”, you’ll know what I mean. He marshals an interesting cast well, managing to stop Richard Widmark from going too far over the top, although he can’t do anything with Elizabeth Ashley who looks pretty comatose herself. He also works well with two cinematographers, creating different atmospheres for the hospital and the Jefferson Institute, a creepy joint in the country where lots of bodies hang in suspended animation. The latter location is shot by Gerald Hirschfield and he does a fine job in his two or three scenes, all geometric lines and eerie blue light. There is, however, nothing to be done with that ending even though it follows a neat little linguistic twist which is so simple that it’ll have you kicking yourself.

Warner Brothers’ R1 DVD is perfectly acceptable although there are no significant extras and the flip side is taken up with a pan/scan version that is, as ever, redundant.

When Tony Richardson made “Tom Jones” in 1963, he revolutionised the approach that cinema took to classic literature by, quite simply, not treating it as classic literature. Given that his subsequent career nose-dived, with a couple of exceptions, its not surprising that he eventually ran for cover and returned to the source of his biggest hit. Sadly, “Joseph Andrews” has none of the freshness or wit of the earlier film, the absence of screenwriter John Osborne being a key factor, and the result is a bizarre mixture of ‘Carry On” humour and faux-historical realism.

The original novel is itself a strange beast and doesn’t lend itself to adaptation, being far more a series of ironic observations on life and literature than a picaresque odyssey. The film tries to turn it into “Tom Jones 2″ by treating the hero, Joseph Andrews, as an innocent beset by a variety of rampant females. On its own terms, this might work if the writing were up to par but it isn’t and its left to the cast to salvage what they can from the mess. Ann-Margret comes across best as Lady Booby because she has enough charm and humour to create a character from nothing and there are nice moments from Beryl Reid as her malaprop maid and John Gielgud as a quack doctor.

But a host of other good actors turn up in bits and have nothing to do - Peggy Ashcroft for example - and others, notably Michael Hordern, are just humiliated. Theoretically, Hordern is perfect casting for Parson Adams but not the conception of the character as a disaster-prone fool that is offered here and the scene where he has to remove his trousers and flash his arse is one of the great embarrassments of seventies cinema.

It all looks nice enough, thanks to David Watkin, and John Addison’s music offers some momentum but the film doesn’t have any dramatic tension and just drifts along as if Richardson doesn’t know what he’s doing. Every time he’s in trouble, he forces in a scene of soft-focus nudity or badly timed slapstick and the result is tedious at best.

I watched this on BBC4 as part of their excellent 18th Century season which has offered some good documentaries and the excellent 1997 TV adaptation of “Tom Jones”.

“Y’know I always liked big tits. Well, I been converted…”

 Perhaps the most wildly original and ferociously inventive soft-core porn flick ever made, “Up!” is the finest product of an unlikely union between American’s foremost sex filmmaker and America’s best known TV film critic. Russ Meyer and Roger Ebert collaborated on three movies - “Beyond The Valley of the Dolls”, “Beyond the Valley of the Ultravixens” and “Up!” - and all of them are delightful in their own way but I have a strong preference for the latter which begins with Adolf Hitler being whipped and sodomised before a mysterious stranger kills him by placing a piranha fish in his bath and then gets even more bizarre. The plot is total insanity, revolving around the deeply pneumatic, Mae West channeling Margo Winchester, perpetually priapic State Trooper Homer, bisexual cafe owner Sweet Li’l Alice and a nude, Shakespeare-spouting Greek chorus played by Meyer’s muse, Kitten Natividad.

It’s hard to adequately describe this film. True, there’s an awful lot of sex - strictly softcore apart from a hilariously fake phallus - and a preponderance of well endowed females running through fields, all the better to display their talents. The story revolves around a search for the piranha-toting murderer, as Kitten keeps reminding us in a series of florid expositions which allow Meyer and Ebert to indulge their love for language at its most self-conscious. Needless to say, this is all non-PC to put it mildly - sample joke, “It’s all red. Looks like you been fucking an Indian” - and there’s a lot of violence, though much of it is inflicted by women on their abusers.

 What makes the films of Meyer and Ebert so delicious is their unpredictability. You really can’t guess what’s coming next - although you can usually bet it will involve a naked woman - and the twists and turns are so outrageously silly that it’s impossible not to submit and go with the flow. “Up!” is eighty minutes of sheer pleasure and has more ideas in five minutes than most Hollywood comedies manage in ninety.

“Up!” is available at a budget price from Arrow Films in the UK. It’s an uncut and quite attractive print with some engaging extras, including a trailer reel which has to be seen to be believed.