I continue to find it astonishing that a film as important as Jacques Tati’s Parade continues to be ignored and unrecognized by most critics. This article about the film was published in the December 1, 1989 issue of the Chicago Reader. —J.R.
PARADE
**** (Masterpiece)
Directed and written by Jacques Tati
With Tati, Karl Kossmayer, the Williamses, the Veterans, the Argentinos, Pia Colombo, Johnny Lonn, Bertilo, Jan Swahn, Bertil Berglund, and Monica Sunnerberg.
1. Jacques Tati’s last feature, Parade (1973), is about as unpretentious as a film can get. One of the first films to have been shot mostly in video (on a shoestring budget for Swedish TV), it’s a music-hall and circus show featuring juggling, music, gags, pantomime, minor acrobatics, and various forms of audience participation. Though it might seem a natural for TV––and in fact has been shown on TV, as well as theatrically, in Europe––it has never been broadcast in this country. Most critics who have seen it, including many passionate Tati fans, regard it as minor and inconsequential. (A striking and valuable exception is Kristin Thompson, whose article on it appeared in the film journal the Velvet Light Trap three years ago.) When, in 1984, a severely mutilated version––missing at least 15 minutes, including the crucial and sublime epilogue––was released in England, London reviewers who scream bloody murder if slasher films are slightly trimmed couldn’t be bothered to raise even a minor protest. Read more
IN A DARK DARK HOUSE by Neil LaBute. Performed at Profiles Theatre, Chicago. Directed by Joe Jahraus. With Darrell W. Cox, Hans Fleischmann, and Allison Torem.
I attended this excellent production exactly a week ago, after discovering that it was playing in my neighborhood, only a few blocks from where I live. As a film critic, I’ve seen five features that LaBute has directed, and liked most of them: IN THE COMPANY OF MEN, YOUR FRIENDS & NEIGHBORS (the only one I didn’t like), NURSE BETTY (the only one he didn’t write or cowrite), POSSESSION, and THE SHAPE OF THINGS (probably my favorite).
This is a fairly compact three-act, three-character play without an intermission, each act running, if memory serves, for about half an hour. Each act begins with one character saying to another, “Go for it,” which is only one of the interesting rhyme effects. Most of it’s about the agonized and edgy relationship between two brothers, both in their 30s, although a teenage girl figures in the middle act, and this being a LaBute play, the onstage flirtation between her and the older brother, which may or may not lead to offstage sex, is really an act of aggression—the brother’s revenge against her offstage father (whom she may also want to get even with), a pivotal offstage character in Acts 1 and 3. Read more
One of my many disappointments in recently reseeing Giant (1956), George Stevens’ blunderbuss effort to preach tolerance to some of the more biased Republicans, is that the once-memorable and semi-audacious use of “The Yellow Rose of Texas” over the final credits — a very significant reprise of a song that plays over a climactic fistfight provoked by anti-Mexican behavior in the movie’s penultimate sequence — is no longer part of the movie on the DVD, presumably because the owners of the song rights demanded too much money. So one of the few facets of this overblown blockbuster that seemed slightly progressive in the mid-50s has been deleted.
Apart from this change, there’s a curious double standard in the way this movie regards prejudice against Mexicans. When it’s displayed throughout much of the film by the Texas patriarch hero, played by Rock Hudson, it may be lamentable and hypocritical but it’s also ultimately forgiveable and redeemable — especially once he rises to the defense of a Mexican family refused service in a diner in the aforementioned fisticuffs. But when the movie’s white-trash villain (James Dean) — a working- class malcontent and crybaby alcoholic who becomes a zillionaire after striking oil on his property — displays the same bias, it’s not only beyond redemption; it even incurs the Wrath of God, Who dramatically whips up a raging thunderstorm to express His indignant rage when this pathetic hick who refuses to stick to his own class also bars Mexicans from attending the festivities at the opening of an airport. Read more
