best/worst: John Huston

I wish you hadn't mentioned that other movie.

I used to teach The Dead in the early '00s when I asked my intro to lit class to read Dubliners. It's more than an honorable try: the Gretta/Gabriel confrontation is as moving as it needs to be.

Also: Prizzi's Honor hasn't survived its (inexplicable) reputation as an '80s Oscar prestige flick, despite how successfully it mixes tones.

Sorry, didn't like it that much at the time either

love it

Alfred, its "prestige" element had mostly to do with Anjelica and Dad working together for the second (and first successful) time, her Ex-Boyfriend's presence (told by the director "Everything you've done til now has been informed by your intelligence -- we can't have any of that"), and maybe a little of the Richard Condon revival (I think Manchurian Candidate had just been brought out of the vaults after a 20-year suppression).

Oh I'm aware of that. Apparently the old buzzard had to gently explain to Nicholson, "Jack, it's a comedy."

What about Bill Hickey?

"You want a cookie?"

the Self-Styled Siren on Devil -- i have to admit i didn't think to look for evidence of Bogart's varying teeth (car accident), but he looks like hell in some scenes more than others.

Jones wrote to Selznick, "Certainly my character has no reality of any kind and whether she is comedy, tragedy, or something 'bourgeois' I haven’t a notion." !!!

http://www.filmcomment.com/blog/beat-the-devil/

Two of the many things I liked about Beat The Devil:
The cinematography by Oswald Mosley Morris, with help from cameraman Freddie Francis
Robert Morley's stuff, presumably ad-libbed by him some of the time, such as "Neptune's mixture!"

"Now, breathe deeply. Remember, every breath is a guinea in the bank of health"

Also, speaking of Freddie Francis, there was the in-joke of one of the characters being named after associate producer Jack Clayton.

Yeah Morley's holding-forth was generally one of the highlights, always got a laugh.

The Criterion edition of Wise Blood is a terrific clean-up; the film's never looked better. I'm not as high on it as I once was twenty years ago: Huston goes for slapstick cornpone as if, like Jack Nicholson later in Prizzi's Honor, he was unsure about finding a tonal equivalent to the O'Connor novel. Excellent Bill Moyers interview from 1982 on the extras.

? Wtf is moyers' connection to this film?

None. Promo interview for Annie.

I'm crazy about Wise Blood but, like you, have not seen it in about 20 years.

Saw Wise Blood introduced by Richard Hell (?) a few years back - he correctly pointed out how bad/inappropriate some of the music is (slapstick cornpone is about right). But I like the film's tonal inconsistency because it reflects how O'Connor's novel can be read as cosmic tragedy or pitch black comedy.

Fat City just got a nice Region 2 Blu Ray release after being a hard film to legit source in the UK, looking forward to checking it out.

That Criterion WB set also has O'Connor reading "A Good Man Is Hard to Find," no?

yes and she's startling

My keepers. Freud is stilted as hell, camp in places ( “You’re the only doctor in the world who asks such questions!” Freud: “In the world perhaps.”)

I'd been meaning to see Fat City for about 30 years and finally did. It's very strong, and I almost immediately wanted to rewatch several scenes.

Susan Tyrell's performance is the type that makes you think, "this has the quality of an Oscar-nominated performance" and then you look it up and find out it was an Oscar-nominated performance.
It's crazy that she was only 26 in this movie - she comes across as a very convincing 40-something barfly.

I know the 70s were a different time but I was surprised when I learned Fat City did well at the box office.

It was Richard Dawson (of Family Feud)'s favorite film

I don't why the scene where Stacey Keach prepares a supper of boot leather steak with cold peas straight from the tin sticks me so much, but it's a classic of the genre.

With ketchup! But did he not heat the peas inside the can? I wasn't sure. Even that would be odd to me.

I think he just poured them straight out cold unless I'm remembering it wrong! It reminds me a bit of my mum telling me when she was living in a scummy bedsit in the early 60's without a cooker and resorted to heating a tin of beans in a constantly boiling electric kettle.

i also enjoyed "fat city." it's got the '70s thing where it has one pop song that it reuses over and over in different versions throughout, which i always appreciate. it's very faithful to the excellent source novel, so if you liked the movie, you might want to read the book too.

rocky had to have been directly influenced by it, right? very similar in being low-key blue-collar character studies disguised as boxing movies

happy birthday, John!

The Kris Kristofferson song works perfectly in Fat City. I was noticing how some Mexican-type horns enter the arrangement when Keach goes off picking fruit with the migrant workers and thought, this is a director (or whoever was responsible) who knows how to use music.

Thanks for pushing me to read the novel; my local bookstore had a copy.

it's very faithful to the excellent source novel

this was always Huston's signature move

whoa:

Under the then-extant rules, Stacy Keach should have been awarded Best Actor from the New York Film Critics Circle for his portrayal of Tully because it required only a plurality of the vote. Keach was the top vote-getter for Best Actor. At the time, the NYCC was second in prestige only to the Academy Awards and was a major influence on subsequent Oscar nominations. A vocal faction of the NYFCC, dismayed by the rather low percentage of votes that would have given Keach the award, successfully demanded a rule change so that the winner would have to obtain a majority. In subsequent balloting, Keach failed to win a majority of the vote, and he lost ground to the performance of Marlon Brando in The Godfather. However, Brando could not gain a majority either. As a compromise candidate, Laurence Olivier in Sleuth eventually was awarded Best Actor.

Coincidentally, director John Huston had initially wanted Brando to play the role of Tully. When Brando informed Huston repeatedly that he needed some more time to think about it, Huston finally came to the conclusion that the star wasn't really interested and looked for another actor until he finally cast the then relatively unknown Keach.

Looking through my books old film reviews it's interesting that neither Pauline Kael, John Simon, nor Stanley Kauffman were much impressed by Stacy Keach's performance. Kael thought Susan Tyrell should have won the Oscar, but her review of the film was mixed - she wondered why she was watching these loser characters. Simon didn't like the film at all and felt that Tyrell's performance was artless and out of control.

Oh, also John Simon's review misspells John Huston's name as Houston throughout.

Brando would've been too old for that role. The character in both the book and the film is 29. Brando was 47. Stacy Keach was the same age as the character.

I don't suppose I will be the first one who thinks Richard Basehart's Ishmael in Moby Dick looks so uncannily like Ewen McGregor that a DNA test shouldn't be out of the question.

Looking through my books old film reviews it's interesting that neither Pauline Kael, John Simon, nor Stanley Kauffman were much impressed by Stacy Keach's performance. Kael thought Susan Tyrell should have won the Oscar, but her review of the film was mixed - she wondered why she was watching these loser characters. Simon didn't like the film at all and felt that Tyrell's performance was artless and out of control.

― Josefa,

I thought Kael said in a later but contemporaneous review that a performance comes around once in a while so bad it's a wonder it doesn't win an Oscar.

^You're right! That was the passage I was referring to, but rereading it now it's clear Kael was being ironic, comparing Tyrrell's performance to previous bad performances that did win Oscars. Kael's phrase, "a performance of that caliber" threw me.

and she's wrong! I had this conversation pre-COVID a couple years ago over drinks about the best drunk performances in film. I mentioned Susan Tyrell, particularly her second bar scene where Keach picks her up. She creates an alternate reality like I've seen other deep alcoholics do.

Still haven't seen Fat City, but anyone looking for a true monster of a Susan Tyrell performance is encouraged to check out the 80s queer horror should-be classic Butcher Baker Nightmare Maker.

Kael thought Susan Tyrell should have won the Oscar, but her review of the film was mixed - she wondered why she was watching these loser characters.

lol I know no one is consistent about stuff like this but "don't want to watch losers" would be a tough standard for a cinemagoer in the 1970's

Man Fat City! Help me make it through the night is used so well. Love how it ends with the second verse, “yesterday is dead and gone.” Nice gut punch