The year is supposed to be 1958, but because the filmmakers are Fargo’s Joel and Ethan Coen — the Beavis and Butt-head of starstruck independents, who clearly consider themselves better than history — what we get are various elements swiped from other movies made between 1929 and 1994, the year this was released. These massive borrowings, many from the screwball comedies of Frank Capra, Preston Sturges, Billy Wilder, and Terry Gilliam (plus a giant clock from Raoul Walsh’s The Horn Blows at Midnight), are mixed together with fancy sets to yield a jeering, dreamlike comedy with nothing much on its mind except how neat the Coen brothers are and how stupid or contemptible everybody else is, including everyone in the audience. This is a fantasy about the invention and mass marketing of the hula hoop as seen through the absurdist rise to executive power of a midwestern hayseed (Tim Robbins) gulled by both a cynical vice president (Paul Newman) and a cynical reporter (Jennifer Jason Leigh). At its best it’s a free-form fantasy with glitzy, well-executed effects and assorted metaphysical conceits but little feeling for any of the characters apart from derision (with a few touches of racism here and there). Read more
Written in March 2011 for Madman Entertainment, an Australian DVD company.
One couldn’t say that there’s any firm consensus that Frank Tashlin’s dazzling 1957 satire about advertising and television is his greatest film. Some Tashlin fans would opt for either of the two late Dean Martin and Jerry Lewis vehicles that he directed for Paramount, Artists and Models (1955) or Hollywood or Bust (1956), or else would select his earlier CinemaScope vehicle for Jayne Mansfield at Twentieth Century-Fox, The Girl Can’t Help It (1956). But there’s certainly no doubt that Will Success Spoil Rock Hunter? stands apart from the rest of his work, as the freest and the most deconstructive of all his comedies — and it’s worth adding that Tashlin himself cited it to Peter Bogdanovich (who interviewed him in 1962, during the shooting of It’$ Only Money) as the film he was “most satisfied with”. (In another interview, he suggested that The Girl Can’t Help It was his other personal favorite; it appears that the role played by executive producer Buddy Adler in granting Tashlin an unusual amount of freedom and leeway on both pictures had a lot to do with these judgments.) In keeping with George S. Read more
Marlon Brando is pitted against Anna Magnani in this 1960 adaptation by Tennessee Williams and Meade Roberts of Williams’s play OrpheusDescending, and as Dave Kehr once remarked in these pages, It’s the biggest grudge match since King Kong met Godzilla. Unfortunately, director Sidney Lumet, who’s sometimes out of his element when he leaves New York, seems positively baffled by the gothic south and doesn’t know quite what to do with the overlay of Greek myth either. With Joanne Woodward, Victor Jory, and Maureen Stapleton. 135 min. (JR)
