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House on Haunted Hill

The Ebert Club is invites you to share this classic William Castle B-rated movie, streaming free. And please join the Club and explore an eclectic assortment of discoveries. Your subscription helps support the Newsletter, the Far-Flung Correspondents and the On-Demanders on my site. – Roger Ebert

House on Haunted Hill (1959) Directed by William Castle. Produced by William Castle. Written by Robb White. Starring Vincent Price, Carolyn Craig, Elisha Cook, Carol Ohmart, Alan Marshal and Julie Mitchum.Synopsis: House on Haunted Hill is the tale of five people invited to spend the night inside a haunted house by an eccentric millionaire, Fredrick Loren, whose throwing a “party” for his fourth wife Annabelle – with the stipulation that the power will be out and the all the doors locked at midnight; allowing no escape. Anyone who stays inside the house for the entire night, assuming they’re still alive come morning, will receive $10,000 each.The five guests all arrive in separate funeral cars with a hearse leading, which he says may be empty now – but they may be in need of it later. Frederick explains the rules of the party and gives each of the guests a .45 pistol for protection. Frederick’s wife tries to warn the guests that her husband is psychotic, causing them to be very suspicious of him now, especially Nora Manning who becomes convinced he’s trying to kill her when she keeps seeing mysterious ghouls –  including the ghost of Annabelle, who’d apparently hanged herself after being forced to attend the party….holy crap, what the hell’s going on..?!

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P.S. ~ IMDb reports: “William Castle used a gimmick called ‘Emergo’ in theaters. When the skeleton rises from the acid vat in the film, a lighted plastic skeleton on a wire appeared from a black box next to the screen to swoop over the heads of the audience. The skeleton would then be pulled back into the box as the skeleton in the film is ‘reeled in.’ Many theaters soon stopped using this effect because when the local boys heard about it, they would bring slingshots to the theater; when the skeleton started its journey, they would pull out their slingshots and fire at it.”

Claude Chabrol, RIP. The master at midpoint

Claude Chabrol, who died Sunday, Sept. 12 at 80, was a founder of the New Wave and a giant of French cinema. This interview, which took place during the 1970 New York Film Festival, shows him at midpoint in his life, just as he had emerged from a period of neglect and was making some of his best films.

By Roger Ebert

NEW YORK — Claude Chabrol’s “This Man Must Die” is advertised as a thriller, but I found it more of a macabre study of human behavior. There’s no doubt as to the villain’s identity, and little doubt that he will die (although how he dies is left deliciously ambiguous).

Unlike previous masters of thrillers like Hitchcock, Chabrol goes for mood and tone more than for plot. You get the notion that his killings and revenges are choreographed for a terribly observant camera and an ear that hears the slightest change in human speech.

For this reason, particularly, it’s necessary to put up a squawk and insisted on the film’s original subtitled version; without the rhythm of the sound track, the movie simply doesn’t work. New Yorkers saw the subtitles, of course, but Allied Artists apparently decided to let the rest of the country see a wretched botch of a dubbing job.

I wouldn’t be surprised if the dubbed version flopped; “Z” ran for months in its exquisite subtitled version, but flopped in the neighborhoods because a lousy dubbed version was substituted.

Let’s face it. Movies by director like Chabrol or Costa-Gavras are intended for the more literate section of the movie audience. You can dub a spaghetti Western and nobody cares, but mess with Chabrol and you’re eliminating the very quality audiences respond to in his work.

In any event, we’re seeing the good version here, and it is one of the best Chabrol films since he began his new career as a student of murder. With Godard veering ever more erratically into left field, and Truffaut exhibiting an alarming tendency to get cute, it’s actually beginning to appear that Chabrol will become the front-running French director of the 1970s – commercially, and maybe even artistically.

Yet as recently as 1967, in his “Interviews with Film Directors,” Andrew Sarris was actually able to write about Chabrol in the past tense: “He quickly became one of the forgotten figures of the nouvelle vague . . . Chabrol found himself so demode by the mid-1960s that he was forced to accept commissioned projects to keep his hand in.”

But just then, when his career as a serious director seemed most in doubt, Chabrol arrived at the 1968 New York Film Festival with “Les Biches.” It was an artful combination of lesbianism and very Chabrolian irony, with a nice bit of murder at the end, which forced you to re-think all the characters. And Chabrol, the first of the New Wave directors to be hailed and the first to be dismissed, was very clearly back in business again.

Les Biches

“Les Biches” was the first film Chabrol made with Andre Genovese, a young Parisian who is, Chabrol says, the only producer he has ever been able to work happily with. They followed it with “La Femme Infidele” (1969), Chabrol’s greatest critical success since “Les Cousins” a decade earlier. Then came “This Man Must Die,” “Le Boucher,” one of the hits of this year’s New York Film Festival, and “Le Rupture,” still unseen in the United States. (“We’re certainly going to have to change that title for the American release,” Chabrol notes cheerfully.)

Taken together, this group of films seems to announce that, at 40, Chabrol is finally realizing the great promise of his early career, There have been 18 Chabrol features so far, and they reflect a distinctly erratic chapter in the history of the New Wave. Chabrol was there at the very beginning, first as a critic for Cahiers du Cinema and then as the director of perhaps the first New Wave film. His “Le Beau Serge” (1958) preceded Truffaut’s “The 400 Blows” by a few months, and when Godard’s “Breathless” appeared the original triumvirate of New Wave directors was established. It still rules.

Chabrol’s sensationally successful “Les Cousins” followed, also in 1958, and the next year he made “A Double Tour” and “Les Bonnes Femmes.”

Although he was by then routinely linked with Truffaut and Godard, his style and taste in material didn’t resemble theirs (nor did they resemble each other, of course, although they made a convenient grouping because of their common disregard for the existing writer-dominated French cinema.)

Chabrol’s 1962 “Landru,” from a screenplay by Francoise Sagan about a World War I mass murderer, can be seen in hindsight as characteristically Chabrolian but having little connection with the concerns of other New Wave directors. It was coolly professional and exhibited the fascination with murder that has been his subject in all the recent films produced by Genovese.

Le Boucher

“Landru” was a commercial and critical success, but “Ophelia” the same year was a failure, beginning a period of involuntary idleness for Chabrol. He married the actress Stephane Audran in 1962 (she was Jean-Louis Trintignant’s former wife and had starred in “Les Cousins”). And then he announced a number of projects, but nothing came of them. In 1964 he directed the first of three comedy thrillers he considers potboilers.

All three were frankly jobs done for money, and if some auteur critics defended them, not many others found them worthy of Chabrol. A 1967 “comeback” project for Universal’s European production division, “The Champagne Murders,” starred Anthony Perkins and was praised in France. But the mutilated U.S. version was a disaster.

One night recently, Chabrol sipped a Scotch and soda in the Greenwich Village apartment of a friend, and talked about it.

“How do you become a director? First, you must start. Second, you must find a producer who is a human being. Andre Genovese is a human being. I can say of all my previous producers that I hated them and they hated me. Just before I met Andre, things were at their blackest. I was doing ‘The Champagne Murders,’ and the producer, so called, was a young man named Jay Kanter who was in charge of Universal’s operation over there.

“He was a good agent, they told me. Why not? But as a producer he was a joke. After I finished the film, they brought in an editor who was described as a ‘doctor.’ He was supposed to make a film out of my film. So what did he do? He made a hodgepodge. For the English version, he cut out 20 -minutes, and inevitably they were the exact 20 minutes for which I made the film.”

Chabrol spread his hands in a gesture of futility. “Editors have an uncanny ability to find what you feel is most important, and cut it out,” he said. “I could have made a stink, but I wasn’t in a very strong position just then. At least they let me have the final cut for the French version. Perhaps I’m not the purist I ought to be. When we were all writing for Cahiers, we looked at Hollywood films that everyone thought were commercial, and we discovered art and morality in them. Fifteen years later, with these recent films of mine, perhaps I’m taking art and morality and making them commercial . . .”

In a sense he’s correct, although “commercial” is a word too negatively charged to describe the exquisite subtlety of “Le Boucher” or “This Man Must Die” (even if they are advertised as thrillers).

Perhaps professionalism is the quality that ought to be substituted; the early Cahiers critics appreciated that quality to such a degree that they actually prized directors whom accepted routine assignments and turned them out competently. Even today, when the budget is not exactly critical, Chabrol makes a point of telling you that John Ford shunned covering shots, and that every shot Chabrol takes is in the film.

Because Genovese respects this, Chabrol says, he gives Chabrol a free hand in making his films, and that, you see, is why the last three years have been so productive for Chabrol.

“Most of the French producers,” Chabrol explained, “are like Zanuck. No, not like Zanuck. Like a little Zanuck. I have a certain regard for Zanuck himself. You know I used to work for him. That’s right! I was the Paris publicity man for 20th Century-Fox in 1955.”

Chabrol sipped his Scotch very seriously, for comic timing, and then allowed himself to grin. “When I quit,” he said, “you’ll never guess who got my job. I gave it to Jean-Luc Godard. Of course he was even worse as a publicity man than I was.

“He always made sure to have the lavatory key. He would come into the office and look busy for an hour, and then say he was sick. Then he would lock himself in the lavatory and read scripts. I know the feeling because I like to read all the time myself, when I’m not watching movies. During the war I was sent out into the country — I must have been about 10 at the time — and I read detective novels all day.

Ten Day’s Wonder

“It was at that time I first read ‘Ten Days Wonder,’ by Ellery Queen, which will be my next film. In writing the script, I worked from the very same copy of Ellery Queen that I read 30 years ago.

“When I wasn’t reading I was going to the movies. I saw ‘Snow ‘White’ at least 10 times between 1937 and 1940 and I think it influenced my work, a little. It was a good horror film. The death of the witch was the best thing Disney ever did. Of course, murder always heightens the interest in a film. Even a banal situation takes on importance when there’s a murder involved.

“I suppose that’s why I choose to work with murder so often. That’s the area of human activity where the choices are most crucial and have the greatest consequences. On the other hand, I’m not at all interested in who-done-its. If you conceal a character’s guilt, you imply that his guilt is the most important thing about him. I want the audience to know who the murderer is, so that we can consider his personality.”

Chabrol said he is rather happy right now about the way his career is going.

“With the films since ‘Les Biches,’ I think I’m on the right track. Not that I was ever on the wrong track, but I believe that period of idleness helped me think things over. You might consider a concert pianist, suddenly unable to give concerts. So he sits at home and practices for two or three years, until somebody hires him again. And then they don’t think about the two years, they think about how well he plays . . .

“Certainly I’m happy right now making these films about murder. My interest isn’t in solving puzzles, but in studying human behavior. Nothing else interests me so much. I’m not a chansonnier, a man obsessed with the events of the day. I am a Communist, certainly, but that doesn’t mean I have to make films about the wheat harvest. I think Godard’s political films have been messy. Right now, Jean-Luc seems to be going through a bachelor’s crisis: Should I marry politics or remain free?”

Chabrol leaned forward to share a confidence.

“I’ll tell you a Party secret,” he said. “Spiro Agnew is a double agent. Of course, he doesn’t know it, but that’s the best kind of agent there is — because he can never blow his own cover!”

His face opened into a beatific smile. He finished his Scotch. He sighed. “Now we go back to France to make a film about murder again,” he said. “In this one, I kill everyone, but it’s no big deal. They’re living at the beginning and dead at the end. In between, there’s a story about a man who breaks the Ten Commandments, one by one. Catherine Deneuve will star, and of course Orson Welles will play God.”
I have many Chabrol reviews online. Use Search on my home page. Here is my Great Movies Collection review of Le Boucher.
From the Telegraph, the best Chabrol obituary..

Chabrol’s 50th and final film: “Inspector Bellamy” (2009)

☑ All of my TwitterPages are linked under the category Pages in the right margin of this page.

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Many of my losing entries in the New Yorker’s daunting Cartoon Caption Contest

It has become a ritual for me to enter the New Yorker’s weekly Cartoon Caption Contest. I won only once, long ago in April 2011, and the magazine’s cartoon editor, Robert Mankoff, wrote a blog about that. In his blog he included three of my losing submissions he enjoyed…and one that was too tumescent, perhaps, to get past the magazine’s board of editors. I believe that one (above) was the funniest I’ve ever submitted. But look over these losers and I’ll link Mankoff’s blog down at the bottom
Go here for Robert Mankoff’s blog.
And click here to enter this week’s contest.

We have heard the chimes at midnight. “Falstaff,” by Orson Welles, free online

Great Movie / Roger Ebert / June 4, 2006

There live not three good men unhanged in England. And one of them is fat and grows old.

How can it be that there is an Orson Welles masterpiece that remains all but unseen? I refer not to incomplete or abandoned projects that have gathered legends, but to “Chimes at Midnight” (1965), his film about Falstaff, which has survived in acceptable prints and is ripe for restoration. I saw the film in early 1968, put it on my list of that year’s best films, saw it again on 16mm in a Welles class I taught, and then could not see it for 35 years.

It dropped so completely out of sight that there is no video version in America, Britain or France. Preparing to attend the epic production of both parts of Shakespeare’s “Henry IV” at the Chicago Shakespeare Theater, I wanted to see it again and found it available on DVD from Spain and Brazil. Both versions carry the original English-language soundtrack; the Brazilian disc is clear enough and a thing of beauty. What luck that Welles shot in black-and-white, so there was no color to fade.

This is a magnificent film, clearly among Welles’ greatest work, joining “Citizen Kane,” “The Magnificent Ambersons,” “Touch of Evil” and (I would argue) “The Trial.” It is also magnificent Shakespeare, focusing on Falstaff through the two “Henry IV” plays to his offstage death in “Henry V.” Although the plays are much abridged, it is said there is not a word in the film not written by Shakespeare.

Falstaff, “this huge hill of flesh,” is one of Shakespeare’s greatest characters — the equal, argues Harold Bloom, of Hamlet. He so dominates the Henry IV plays that although Shakespeare promised he would return in Henry V, he reconsidered; the fat knight would have sounded the wrong note in that heroic tale, and so we learn from Mistress Quickly of his death, as he “babbl’d of green fields.”

Welles was born to play Falstaff, not only because of the physical similarity but because of the rich voice, sonorous and amused, and the shared life experience. Both men lived long and too well, were at odds with the powers at court and were constantly in debt. Both knew disappointment, and one of the most sublime moments in Welles’ career is simply the expression on his face at the coronation of Henry V, when he cries out “God save thee, my sweet boy,” and the new king replies, “I know thee not, old man.”

Prince Hal, later Henry V, is played in the film by Keith Baxter, who looks dissolute enough in the roistering at the Boars Head Tavern, but as early as Act 1, Scene 2 is an unpleasant hypocrite in the monologue where he admits his present misdeeds but promises to reform at the right time. In Shakespeare, this is a soliloquy; in Welles, Falstaff listens in the back of the shot and is forewarned. Later, in an echo of that composition, the prince looks impatiently toward the field of battle as Falstaff, behind him, questions the concept of honor. That each man hears the other’s intended soliloquy adds a dimension to both.

Welles as director uses some of his familiar visual strategies; the vast interiors of Henry IV’s castles contrast with the low ceilings and cluttered rooms of bawdy houses, just as the vast space of Kane’s great hall contrasts with the low ceilings and dancing girls of the New York Inquirer. Royalty in “Chimes at Midnight” is framed by vast cathedral vaults, with high windows casting diagonals of light. Welles uses dramatic camera angles, craning to look up at the trumpeters atop the battlements as Henry IV rides off to battle.

At Mistress Quickly’s, on the other hand, Falstaff and his roisterers have great freedom of movement involving doorways and posts, barrels and vertiginous staircases, barking dogs and laughing wenches. He and other actors circle verticals and one another as they speak, just as Welles and Joseph Cotten circled in “Citizen Kane” and “The Third Man.” And watch the use of deep focus when he begins a shot with Hal seated in the background and, as news of his father’s death is conveyed, Hal stands and moves forward, finally looming over the camera in foreground. All one shot.

The scene of the battle of Shrewsbury is justly famous. It lasts fully 10 minutes, chaotic action at a brutal pitch, horses and men confused in smoke and fog, steel crashing against steel, cries of pain, desperate struggles, confused limbs caked in mud and blood, men falling exhausted or dead. Barbara Leaming, one of Welles’ biographers, says the scene was created by careful framing; Welles at no time had more than about 100 extras, yet seems to have a multitude, and the violence of the struggle was studied by Mel Gibson before he directed “Braveheart.”

The battle is intercut with shots of a fat man in armor, hurrying and scurrying out of the way and finally playing dead. When Hal finds Falstaff flat on his back, he cries out, “What, old acquaintance! Could not all this flesh keep in a little life?” We know Falstaff is not dead, and Welles finds a way to let Hal know, too: the frost on the old man’s breath puffs out from beneath his visor. Yes, it was cold. Welles shot on location in Spain, in winter; his first shot shows Falstaff as a tiny figure in a vast field of snow, his last shows Falstaff’s coffin being pushed across snow toward his grave, and in several of John Gielgud’s speeches as Henry IV, we can see the frost on his breath.

That Gielgud played the king and others such as Margaret Rutherford (Mistress Quickly) Jeanne Moreau (Doll Tearsheet) and Fernando Rey (Worcester) also appeared in the film is a tribute to Welles’ reputation, for on a budget of less than $1 million he was, like Falstaff, not prompt to pay. Gielgud plays Henry IV as a dying man almost from his earliest scenes, plagued with guilt because of how he won his throne. His son is no consolation; the king envies Northumberland his son Henry Percy, known as Hotspur (Norman Rodway), and wishes “would I have his Harry, and he mine.” He excoriates the thief and whoremonger Hal and his low companions, none lower in deportment or loftier in essential humanity than Falstaff.

How good is Falstaff? Consider the way warm affection illuminates the face of Jeanne Moreau as Doll Tearsheet caresses and tickles her beloved old rogue. Note the boundless affection Falstaff has for all around him, so real that even Quickly forgives his debts and allows him to contract new ones.

Such scenes illuminate the life Welles poured into “Chimes at Midnight.” He came early to Shakespeare; he edited and published editions of some of the plays while still at prep school. On stage and screen, he was also Othello and Macbeth, his voice fell naturally into iambic rumbles, he was large enough for heroes and so small he could disappear before Henry V’s scorn. He once asked an audience, reduced by a snowstorm: “Why are there so many of me and so few of you?”

There was not something Falstaffian about Welles, there was everything. As a young man he conquered all that came before him (at Shrewsbury a knight meekly surrenders to the old man, awed by his leftover reputation). Welles grew fat and in debt, took jobs unworthy of him, was trailed by sycophants and leeches, yet was loved by good women and honored by those who could see him clearly. And he battled on, Quixotic as well as Falstaffian, commencing grand schemes and sometimes actually finishing them (indeed, his “Don Quixote” can now be seen in intriguing but incomplete form).

The crucial point about “Chimes at Midnight” is that although it was rejected by audiences and many critics on its release, although some of the dialogue is out of sync and needs to be adjusted, although many of the actors become doubles whenever they turn their backs, although he dubbed many of the voices himself, although the film was assembled painstakingly from scenes shot when he found the cash — although all of these things are true, it is a finished film, it realizes his vision, it is the Falstaff he was born to direct and play, and it is a masterpiece. Now to restore it and give it back to the world.

Walt Kelly, an immortal

The creator of “Pogo” died on this day in 1973.

☑ Click to expand.

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Werner Herzog reads “Go the F**k to Sleep”

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R. L. Burnside: A something man

I don’t like to link to music vidos that are only slideshows, without live performance footage. But this first clip is my favorite Burnside song, and I think it’s appropriate for hard times.

R. L. Burnside on Wikipedia.

The triumph of the day-fly

Thanks to my reader Carl Appleton for the link.
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The Best B-Rated Movie Trailers Ever!

Each year, as film critics publish their top 10 lists, I can’t help but feel a pang of genuine empathy for those who go unheralded – all those hard working wannabes and former television stars who’d poured their heart and souls into making the best bad movie they could, dammit. Seriously, there’s an art to making crap and I think we should celebrate it!  And so for what it’s worth, here’s my top 10 list of “The Best B-Rated Movie Trailers Ever!” – Marie Haws, Ebert Club Secretary.
10 – Message from Space (1978)

374th NYorker cartoon caption contest. My entry

Happiness is being on the road again

By Roger Ebert
November 16, 1986

Most people who are on the road all the time seem to be running from something. Willie Nelson seems to be looking for it. One of his best friends says Willie can’t be happy for long unless he’s going somewhere – by plane, car, train, bus, foot; it doesn’t matter, just as long as he’s in motion. One recent rainy day, Willie flew out of Austin, Texas, and spent some time in Chicago, and later that night laid his head to rest in New York City.

“I guess I’m just restless,” he said here, stirring sugar into his black coffee in the middle of the afternoon. “It’s difficult for me to stay in one spot for long. I really do like to get up and go somewhere, maybe because I’ve done it all my life. Billy Joe Schaffer has a line, about being so restless that moving’s the closest thing to being free.”

Nelson was wearing a trimmed-down version of the bushy beard he grew for “Red-Headed Stranger,” his new movie, and he had his long hair in two braids — he’s letting it grow again, after cutting it short a few years ago. He was in Chicago to promote the movie, a labor of love that he filmed on his Texas ranch with the help of friends, neighbors, and a mysterious Boston woman who turned up one day with a check for $50,000. (The film’s distributor has yet to book a Chicago area theater.)

He is a big star and he doesn’t travel light. There must have been a half dozen business partners, assistants, publicists, movie distributors and old pals who checked into the hotel with him, but it was all so low-key I figured they took their tone from him, and he never seemed in a hurry about anything. I asked him if he still used the bus that was the co-star of “Honeysuckle Rose,” or if he only used private planes now.

“I love the bus,” he said. “You know you’ve been somewhere. Ham and eggs at dawn in some truck stop somewhere, if that’s what you’re hungry for. We live in the bus or in hotels a lot, and we like it. My life is very close to the autobiographical movies, `Honeysuckle Rose’ and `Songwriter.’ “

Those two movies demonstrated Nelson’s strange ability, as a movie actor, to create a powerful character while scarcely seeming to raise his voice. Neither one was a box office hit; indeed, Willie Nelson’s movie career has consisted of sleepers and lost films and projects producers lost interest in.

His first starring role was “Honeysuckle Rose,” the 1980 saga of a hard-drinking country music star and the tug-of-war between his wife (Dyan Cannon) and girl friend (Amy Irving). Then came “Barbarosa” (1982), an offbeat Western about two legendary cowboys and their feud with a Mexican land baron. The studio didn’t even want to release that one, even though co-star Gary Busey had recently won an Oscar nomination for “The Buddy Holly Story.” Then in 1984 came “Songwriter,” with Nelson and Kris Kristofferson in the story of a man determined to regain his independence from the pressures of the recording industry. And now here is “Red-Headed Stranger,” inspired by Nelson’s album of 11 years ago which tells the story of a preacher who tries t o tame an evil town, is abandoned by his wife, kills his wife and her lover, and then spends years in exile in the wilderness before riding back in to meet his fate in that same town.

Whatever it is that Nelson has as a movie actor, a lot of important directors have been attracted to it. The first movie was directed by Jerry (“Scarecrow”) Schatzberg, the second by Fred (“Chant of Jimmy Blacksmith”) Schepisi, the third by Alan (“Choose Me”) Rudolph, and this one is the directorial debut of Bill Wittliff, who wrote the first two. In all of them, Nelson plays a recognizable version of himself, as a weathered, quiet, gentle man who gives hints of having suffered more than he should have, and being more cheerful than he has reason to be.

“The movie thing all started after a party one night in Nashville,” Nelson said, remembering. “It was a fund-raiser for some ecological project Robert Redford was sponsoring, and the next day I found myself on the same plane with Redford, flying back to Los Angeles. He asked me if I had ever wanted to be in the movies, and I said, well, yeah, sure, I supposed so. I guess he already had me in mind for something.”

That would have been Redford’s “Electric Horseman” (1979), where Nelson’s official film acting debut was short but unforgettable (he described a woman as being “able to suck the chrome off a trailer hitch”). Even after four starring roles, he said he’s still not happy while he’s making a movie: “It’s difficult for me to sit in one spot for three months.”

And it was difficult to make “Red-Headed Stranger,” he added, because the role was so different from himself. “In the songwriter movies, I was basically just being myself. This one I had to stretch a little. But I wanted to make it. When I wrote the album for some reason I could see a movie being made of it. And I just felt like if it were to be made into a movie, I could probably play that character as well as anybody. I used to sing the song to my kids as a bedtime story.”

It’s kind of a grim story, with the preacher starting out with his high ideals and then murdering what he loved, and descending into self-destruction before he finally gets it together again.

“I think it shows how far down a person can go and then come back, regardless of who he is. And that even a preacher, who is a human being, can drop to that depth and then come back. The thing I wanted to avoid was just turning the movie into one long music video. There was plenty of music available, enough that we could put a song under every scene if we wanted to, but I fought with Wittliff over that. He wanted a lot of music. At first, I didn’t want any music at all. I guess we met in the middle somewhere.”

The result: an odd Western road picture, somewhat strangely cast (Morgan Fairchild plays Nelson’s first wife, and Katharine Ross makes a rare film appearance as the widow who gives him new hope). Nelson spent years trying to finance the project. He described his troubles: “The movie calls for a raging black stallion and a dancing bay pony, and I bought them both when I started the project, but by the time I got the movie made, the dancing bay pony wasn’t dancing too much and the raging black stallion wasn’t raging too much.”

Finally, he said, he and Wittliff pared the budget down to rock bottom and built the sets out back on Nelson’s Texas ranch, and started shooting. One example of cutting corners: In the original script, the bad guys blew up the town’s water tower, but in the finished version, they just open the tap and drain the water – saving the cost of a $40,000 explosion.

“To keep the thing going, we were writing hot checks at one point,” Nelson said. “None of them bounced, though. I guess the people that got them just had enough faith to hold onto them until they figured they were good.”

But you have a lot of money, don’t you? You’re rich and famous.

“Rich, I don’t know about. I don’t have that much money. I make a lot of money and I spend a lot of money. I have a lot of expenses. The music business brings the money in, and the ranches and various real estate that I have take the money out again. My ranch in Texas is not what you’d describe as a money-making proposition. I keep some pleasure horses there and I enjoy the hell out of it, but it’s not a working ranch.”

He poured himself some more coffee and smiled to himself.

“With `Red-Headed Stranger,’ what saved us was the generosity of a woman in Boston named Carolyn Musar. I only mention her name because she hates it whenever I do. She happened to be a fan of mine, and she heard somewhere that we were short of money to finish this movie, and she told her lawyer, “Find out how much those guys need,’ and she was on the set two days later with a $50,000 check as a loan. It came at just the crucial moment.”

Nelson, who said he wasn’t sure when the film would be released, said he was keeping busy. He was featured in a recent “Miami Vice” episode, he went to New York to be honored as “Man of the Year” by the Jewish United Fund, he was planning a tour, and he was still active on the follow-through for Farm-Aid (the fund- and consciousness-raising extravaganza he produced last summer in Champaign-Urbana, Ill.). All of this for a country singer who likes to call himself an outlaw. I asked him what “outlaw” meant to him, now that he was part of the establishment that had once rejected him.

“Freedom,” he said simply. “Freedom to decide for yourself, whatever it is. I think that’s why the term caught on so much with the public; it’s not going the way someone tells you to go.”

It also meant, for a lot of people during Nelson’s earlier days, the wild-and-woolly lifestyle that he celebrated in “Honeysuckle Rose” (which was renamed “On the Road Again” for its TV and video reincarnation). In the movie, as – some said – in real life, Nelson and his sidekicks drank and partied their way from one stop to another, leaving a trail of empty bottles and broken hearts behind. But now the wild life has settled down considerably for many of country music’s outlaws — Nelson’s pals Johnny Cash, Kris Kristofferson and Waylon Jennings have all gone public with their decisions to stop drinking and/or drugging, and Hank Williams Jr. even wrote a song about how his rowdy old friends had mellowed. I asked Nelson if he would mind a question about his wild reputation.

“I’ll answer any question.”

Well, then, do you still live in the style that made “outlaw” famous?

“I drink less, much less. Moderation is the key. I used to overdo everything.”

Is it hard to make the tours and live the life on the bus when you’re cleaning up your act?

“I think it’s important that you surround yourself with a bunch of guys who have the same head that you do, so you’re all on a somewhat similar level, or when you hit the bandstand it’s not gonna be right. The important thing is that we really do enjoy performing. Other people may call it work. I’m not happy for long unless I’m singing somewhere. Every show is different.”

How do you write a song?

“The way it begins is in my head. A lot of things won’t let you not write them. I don’t actually write anything down for a long time, and so the test is, if I can remember it, it must be worth writing down. If I get out the pencil and paper, I’m already sold on it. But also, I have a belief that any song, if it was good once, it’s still good. That’s why I like to record a lot of other people’s songs, standards, things like the `Stardust’ album (a best seller from 1978).”

Did you get criticism in the country music world for recording “Stardust” and the other pop classics? Did people think that wasn’t pure enough, from a country point of view?

“Not so much criticism as dubiousness. The `Stardust’ album was not thought to be the greatest idea by a lot of people. But these were the songs I’d been playing all my life anyway. And in clubs, people would request `Stardust’ and `Harbor Lights’ and then turn right around and ask for `Fraulein,’ `San Antonio Rose’ or `Whiskey River.’ People just like good music, a lot of different kinds of music. And I was singing `Stardust’ a long time before I was singing country.”

Somehow that doesn’t fit the image.

“Oh, but it’s true. I learned music from my grandparents, and they learned it by mail order from a place called,” Nelson said, pausing, “I think the return envelopes said it was called the Chicago Musical Institution. They’d study under kerosene lamps every night. I watched them, they’d have their lessons out of the mail-order books, and then send them back through the mail, and finally they got their degrees. They were about 60 years old then. Sixty years old and still taking their lessons, still young enough to learn something. They had great spirit. I thought so.

“My granddad died when I was 6. He’d taught me some chords on the guitar. My grandmother played the piano and organ a little, but she was getting old and had arthritis. She taught my sister Bobbie how to play the piano, and I learned from her. I’d play guitar and she’d play piano, and that’s when I first sang ‘Stardust.’ I learned it from her.

“I’ve been singing it since before I knew what it meant.”

Did your grandmother live long enough to see you perform in public?

“Yes, she did. She would come to a place in Fort Worth called the Panther Hall Ballroom whenever I’d play there. She was in her 80s.”

The afternoon was growing dark, and the rain was starting up again. Before long it would be time for Willie Nelson to head out for the airport again, and fly to New York. I asked him how it felt to be “Man of the Year.”

“If they’ve named me that, there must be a few things they don’t know about me,” he said, and chuckled. “I guess I got it because of the Farm Aid thing, which is really one of the things I’ve done in my life that was a great thing. When I first got into the issue of family farms, I had no idea the problem was as severe as it was. I thought we’d do a benefit to call attention to the farmer thing, and Washington would say, `Oh, they’re having a problem,’ and the next day the whole thing would be worked out. But the problem is getting worse. Hundreds of farmers are going under every week.”

Have you ever thought of running for office?

“Yeah. A long time ago. I was approached to run for senator from Texas, and I had to decide, and I decided not to. I’m an entertainer, and so the very fact that in order to become a politician you have to piss off half of the country didn’t seem very smart. Why chop off half of your audience just so you could walk around and say, “I’m a senator’?”

And so that’s how America lost its chance at the first outlaw senator. What about retirement?

“Yeah, I suppose I’ll hang it up someday. Everybody does. But not this year or the next. When I do, I’d like to maybe buy me a little one-pump gas station somewhere in south Texas. You know, pretty far from town, and without much traffic.”

If you’re a Comcast customer, “Red-Headed Stranger” is streaming.

Some 200 of my TwitterPages are linked at the right.
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Manuel de Oliveira is 102: A tribute

The first three scenes from “A Talking Picture” (2003)

The complete film is streaming on Netflix Instant, which introduces it: “A beautiful history professor (Leonor da Silveira) and her 8-year-old daughter embark on a Mediterranean cruise from Lisbon to Bombay. Along the way, they talk about myths, legends and the milestones of Mediterranean civilization. Their compelling discourse about the history of Western civilization eventually includes the ship’s captain, Comandante John Walesa (John Malkovich). Also stars Catherine Deneuve, Irene Papas and Stefania Sandrelli.”

Three other films by de Oliveira are streaming on Netflix.

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Guys: Danger signals on a date

I had a date like this once. Hell, I was date like this once.

Video Scout: Larry J. Kolb, ex-CIA

The secret of Jacques Tati

26th May 2010

Dear Mr Ebert

Please let me first introduce myself. My name is Richard McDonald the middle grandson of the celebrated French filmmaker Jacques Tatischeff.

Having read with concerned interest your current blog documenting your experiences at this years Cannes Film Festival I hereby obliging write to you on behalf of my grandfathers only direct living family with information that you should be made aware of concerning the often ignored yet historically significant chapter of his life.

As you aware, having seen the trade screening at the Cinema Arcades in Cannes, this year will see the international release of an adaptation of my grandfather’s original l’Illusionniste script by Sylvain Chomet and Pathe Pictures/ Sony Picture Classic. Before participating further in any active promotion of Chomet’s adaptation of Tati’s l’Illusionniste we would appreciate that you first consider how his interpretation greatly undermines both the artistry of my grandfather’s original script whilst shamefully ignoring the deeply troubled personal story that lies at its heart.

I hope that you will be able to appreciate the significance of this information and compassionately understand the hurt that the misrepresentation of history by those involved in this production has already caused.

“Really I assure you, in all my films I did absolutely everything I wanted to do. If you don’t like that, them, I am the only one to blame”

— Jacques Tati: Cahiers du Cinema, 1980

It is well documented that my grandfather, Jacques Tati, wrote the script of l’Illusionniste as a sentimental semi-autobiographical reflection on how he was feeling about himself and in particular what he saw as his personal failings during the 1950’s. It is also documented that the script was written as a personal letter to his teenage daughter. What is less well known however is the depth of his deceitful torment and how in the script he wrestles with the notion of publicly acknowledging his eldest daughter, my mother, who he had under duress from his elder sister heartlessly abandoned during the Second World War. At the time performing at the Lido de Paris with his long term lover, my grandmother Herta Schiel, Tati’s deplorable conduct towards his first child was met with utter disgust by the majority of his then stage colleagues. Thrown out of the Lido by Leon Volterra, it was from this act, having been shunned by the Paris cabaret circuit for his caddish betrayal of one of their own and not as is often wrongly told to avoid Nazi recruiters, that Tati took refugee in the village of Sainte-Sévère in 1943, where he would later shoot Jour de Fete. The stage performers of Paris were a close knit community and in the same way that they had previously provided for Piaf they would also collectively help shelter Tati’s abandoned infant daughter Helga Marie-Jeanne whom as Piaf was born in Paris at the Hôpital Tenon located in the 20th arrondissement.

At its heart the original script for l’Illusionniste focuses on a conjurer who upon finding that his act has became unfashionable is resorted to travel to ever further distant venues to earn a living. It is at one of these locations, originally intended to be a small town in Czechoslovakia that he befriends a young teenage girl who appears to be without family. Enthralled by the illusionist tricks which she believes to be real magic a father/daughter relationship evolves between the movies two protagonists. As the parental relationship builds the conjurer’s engagement in the village comes to an end and the unlikely pair head to the big city, originally set to be Prague. For the first time in her life the young girl is exposed to the enchantment of a big city. Afraid to lose the young girl’s affections to the charms of the city the illusionist unwilling to disappoint her with the truth about his life does everything he can to maintain the notion that his magic is real. However the lure of the city is powerful and the young girl attracts the attention of a handsome young man who exposes the conjurer’s magic as fraudulent, nothing more than cheap tricks, illusions created to entertain an audience. Unable to hold onto her affections once his charade has been exposed the script concludes with the conjurer disappearing off into the sunset free of his deceit having as he always known he would lost the affections of the young girl to youth and the vibrancy of the city once she was able to see beyond his theatrics.

How the original script for l’Illusionniste reflects my grandfather’s personal troubled dilemmas at its time of writing can be explained by taking account of the following facts.

1 It is well documented that Tati, my grandfather, wrote l’Illusionniste an emotive semi-autobiographical account of how during the 1950’s he felt about himself and in particular what he saw as his professional and personal failings at the time.

2 It has been acknowledged that the script for l’Illusionniste was written as a personal letter to Tati’s teenage daughter. Sophie his second child was not a teenager at the time of its writing, only his eldest daughter, Helga Marie-Jeanne whom he had adversely neglected as an infant was. In 1955 Helga was thirteen years of age, Sophie had just turned nine. Consecutive versions of l’Illusionniste script exist dated from 1955 through to 1959.

3 Tati played with idea’s for l’Illusionniste throughout the mid to late 1950’s the writing of which coincided with a letter written to him by his eldest daughter, Helga Marie-Jeanne. As a refugee Helga Marie-Jeanne had become trapped in Marrakech during the Moroccan 1955 uprising for independence against its French protectorate. Having been at the centre of the Christmas Eve bombing of the main Marrakech market in which she witnessed the massacre of a number of her boarding school friends, Helga Marie-Jeanne was actively encouraged by the French Consulate to flee Morocco for her own safety. Holding only a French passport she wrote to her father in hope that he would show compassion towards her plight and help her escape the hostilities that had built up in Morocco by offering her safe passage back to her home city of Paris. He was never forthcoming with help. However the request for help from his own daughter could only have weighed heavily on Tati the man, the artist, who had during the same period written the most sensitive observations of childhood innocence and parenthood with Academy Award winning Mon Oncle.

In Mon Oncle Tati would take the opportunity to swipe fun at the notion of arranged marriages which his elder sister Nataile had manipulated him into after the rejection of his own daughter in real life. Natalie had an overbearing influence over Tati and his abandonment of his eldest daughter was greatly influenced by her depraved intervention. Tati’s script for l’Illusionniste parallels many of the dilemmas he was facing in his real life at the time, acceptance that he wasn’t getting any younger, the failing popularity of live cabaret, befriending and taking on his parental duties towards a teenage girl he knew little about, bringing that teenager to a big city and the dilemma of ultimately losing the child’s affection once the veil of his stage persona was exposed.

4 Tati, in keeping with his preference of not working with professional actors, had singled out Sylvette David who had modelled for Picasso for the role as the teenage girl due to her resemblance to Bridget Bardot. In her letter from Morocco Helga Marie-Jeanne had innocently joked that the locals of Marrakech had nicknamed her the brunette Bardot of the Sahara. David did not sit for Picasso until 1954 so it can only be concluded that Tati did not know of her until after this date.

5 Tati had set l’Illusionniste in the Czech capital city of Prague. The mother of his eldest child Herta Schiel was of duel nationality and escaped the German annexation of Vienna using Czech papers. She remained a Czech citizen throughout the war. Tati always referred to Herta as being Czech.

6 The original l’Illusionniste script focuses on how from a distance the teenage girl believes with utter wonderment the enchanting life the conjurer inhabits. After making a sentimental bond through his stage persona with the girl he does not have the heart to reveal to the teenager that his magic and what she sees as his very life are little more than a fabricated illusion. Throughout his career Tati was often quoted as saying that his Hulot was just a character he had created and he himself was a very different person to what was seen on screen. His eldest daughter’s perception of him as a child was mainly formed from what she had seen of him in character on screen. l’Illusionniste script deals directly with the dilemma he was facing on how would his daughter respond once she realised the gentile man on the silver screen was not the same man he was after the dim theatre lights had been switched back on.

7 The original script for l’Illusionniste concludes with the magician walking off into the sunset wiser for the experience and free of his deceit. Tati had hoped that by openly apologising to his eldest daughter he would in some way be free of his real life deception that increasingly contradicted his growing public persona. The very title, l’Illusionniste illustrates how Tati was aware at how his public persona was a veil that contradicted the real man. Conjurers by their very craft are deceitful.

8 Tati had never intended to play the role of the illusionist himself instead he had intended to cast Pierre Etaix in the leading role but Etaix fell out with Tati over moral issues concerning the script. A bitter feud surfaced and the two men never again spoke. Tati copyrighted l’Illusionniste script at the beginning of the 1960’s as he was concerned that both Etaix and Jean-Claude Carrière would try and steal it. All of Tati’s old music hall colleagues knew of his eldest daughter he had fathered in Paris during the Second World War and the majority felt his actions to one of their own betrayed them all. It is highly likely Etaix or Carrière would have known about Tati’s eldest child.

9 My Grandmother Herta Schiel never lost contact with her Parisian music hall colleagues and throughout her life would travel nearly every year back to Paris. It was through these connections that she learnt that Tati had written a script for the daughter he had shamefully betrayed. No name was ever given to the script but knowing of only two other un-produced scripts by Tati, The Occupation of Berlin (which has currently conveniently gone missing) and Confusion it can be concluded that l’Illusionniste with the parallels it draws is indeed that script. The l’Illusionniste was written around the same period as The Occupation of Berlin when Tati must have been reflecting upon his war years. Performers of the Lido de Paris, Bal Tabarin and A.B.C. who had known Tati both as a friend and colleague since he himself was a teenager still remarkably live in Paris and to this day are in regular contact with his eldest daughter Helga Marie-Jeanne. Nothing that Tati did in his movies was by accident but exist as a result of meticulous planning to precisely convey his very personal vision.

On hearing that Sylvain Chomet had started production on l’Illusionniste in what for centuries has been my father’s family home county of Northumberland on the Scottish border I confidentially approached him with the difficult true story that lay at the heart of my grandfather’s script. Gratefully acknowledging l’Illusionniste true meaning that he had apparently always known was written by Tati as a “personal letter to his daughter” Chomet invited me to his Edinburgh studio to read the script he had adapted and to see the progress he was making.

After a long conversation Chomet revealed he had obtained the script for l’Illusionniste from my Aunt Sophie Tatischeff following nothing more than a single telephone conversation he had with her whilst seeking permission to use a segment of Jour de Fete in his Belleville Rendez-Vous animated movie. Sophie died regrettably young in October 2001 a full two years before Belleville was released in late 2003 and it is questionable that she would have released what she had protected for so long to an unknown director she would never in person meet and who at the time had nothing to his name but a well received short animation. It was impossible for Sophie to give Chomet the script for l’Illusionniste after she had seen Belleville Rendez-Vous as he has often been quoted as saying.

Chomet justifies using an animated caricature of Tati by saying that Sophie never wanted anyone to play her father however she would have been well aware that her father never intended playing the part of the Illusionist himself, he had no conjuring skills and wanted solely to concentrate his efforts on writing and directing this most personal movie. As stated above the role was originally written for Pierre Etaix.

After Chomet became aware of the troubled story that lay beneath l’Illusionniste he informed the current caretakers of my grandfather’s estate, Jerome Deschamps and Mikall Micheff at Les Films de Mon Oncle, who without consent published the most deplorable inaccurate account of my family in the biography Jacques Tati by Jean-Philippe Guerand. This intolerable disfiguring of our lives provoked us as a family and all that remains of the Tatischeff line with no choice but to finally put on record our true heritage to which everybody who is currently promoting themselves through my grandfathers celebrity have no legitimate claim whatsoever.

The partners at Les Films de Mon Oncle certainly never had a hand in the creation of my grandfathers oeuvre nor are they in anyway related to him. When Tati became bankrupt the Deschamps family chose to do nothing but glee at his downfall. It is quite deplorable that today they should be allowed to parasitically exploit both his abilities and failings whilst disturbingly distorting history. Deschamps came into ownership of four of Tati’s movies after he purchased them from a terminally ill Sophie Tatischeff in the last year of her life to pay her debts (she’d lost a fortune with her recording studio, Son our Son) as she did not want to die with the shame of bankruptcy like her father. Deschamps absolutely did not inherit the Tatischeff estate as a rightful heir as he would like the world to think. Working closely with highly respected Princeton academic David Bellos who is credited with writing the most discerning biographical account of my grandfather’s life we have been able to publicly document for the first time the true events that were Tati’s War years..

What we ask is that you please try and understand the most unjust personal anguish that my family has faced for so long with nothing but the utmost reserved dignity and why the promoting of my grandfathers most personal script on the issue without acknowledging his troubled intentions for its creation, never mind how it has been spitefully reinterpreted, will only add further insult to everyone personally involved. Not recognising the source for l’Illusionniste shows not only disrespect for Tati the artist but also subverts the man’s only redeeming response towards his daughter he inconsiderately abandoned.

To the outside world my grandfather, Jacques Tati was the great mime, the celebrated cinematic artist who held the most special gift of being able to entertain and make people laugh through his unique humane way of portraying the often crazy world in which we all live. However as he always maintained his celluloid characters were not him but creations born from his real life observations. Like many artists he was also troubled for this was also the same man who in complete contradiction to his professional screen persona had heartlessly abandoned both his eldest child, Helga Marie-Jeanne and her mother, Herta Schiel in the most shameful of circumstances. Tati courted and performed on stage at the Lido de Paris with Herta for the two years previous to the birth of their child. Inseparable Tati would enthusiastically discuss with Herta his ambitious plans to create his own movies and as early as 1941 he already had L’Ecole des Facteurs/Jour de Fete envisaged.

In Herta existed a vibrant brave young woman who at just seventeen years of age had the foresight alongside her sister Molly to flee the impending annexation of Vienna whilst courageously providing shielding and eventual safe passage to Morocco for their most admired childhood Jewish friend, Heinz Lustig. A young woman barely out of childhood herself who having arrived in Pairs with little more than a visa allowing her only to perform on the stage went on to courageously at great personal risk learn Morse Code and translate intercepted German messages from the front line into French for the Resistance movement before they were sent to De Gaulle in London. A woman whose only mistake was to fall in love then be betrayed by the gangling clown who would go on to charm the world with laughter in the way he ridiculed and questioned it.

In a single year, 1943 Herta’s gallantry would be severely challenged as she found herself isolated in a foreign occupied city holding a needy new born child having lost both the man she loved and heartbreakingly her sister to tuberculosis. The mother of Tati’s first child was a valiant woman who was not afraid to stand up for the freedom of Europe and today rightfully deserves not to be forgotten.

Tati’s eldest daughter, Helga Marie-Jeanne always maintaining a Parisian soul would spend most of her life to adulthood in between Paris, Marrakech and Vienna. Having grown without knowing the love of a father in adulthood she could not bare the thought of bringing the shame she had suffered as a child for his betrayal to her half-brother, Pierre and sister, Sophie. It is for this reason alone that at the height of her father’s celebrity she remained dignifiedly silently even under pressure to create scandal. Helga Marie-Jeanne had suffered enough as a child for her father’s betrayal, in adulthood she determinedly decided to make her own way in the world. In honour of Helga Marie-Jeanne’s dignified humility and her mother’s wartime intelligence work Croix de Guerre awarded Parisian Resistance leader Dr Jacques Weil would stand in the place of her father when she married in England in the summer of 1965. Today as a much loved retired grandmother living in the northeast of England the least she deserves is respectful acknowledgement. Had she not remained resolutely silent it is highly unlikely that her father, Jacques Tatischeff would have been able to complete his cinematic oeuvre that still enthralls today.

My grandfather’s artistry did not come without a price and the one who suffered the most for his compulsive behaviour was inexcusably his eldest daughter. Had it not been for the love of her brave astute mother, the goodwill of others and Helga Marie-Jeanne’s own self discipline her fate would have been far bleaker.

My family’s story is unfortunately not the romantic fiction of Truffaut’s Last Metro or Curtiz’s Casablanca. It is however a true account of how during that most horrendous period in modern history people’s moral character was challenged when faced with adversity. Had Tati not survived his military service defending the French borders on the Western Front he might well have died a war hero. Instead the subsequent war years would see him conjure up the most indefensible family tragedy, a betrayal that runs in complete opposition to the legendary tale of how his own grandmother had rescued her son from Russia. The suffering of a child is inexcusable in any society. The sabotaging of Tati’s original l’Illusionniste script without recognizing his troubled intentions so that it resembles little more than a grotesque eclectic nostalgic homage to its author is the most disrespectful act that shows nothing but a total lack of compassion towards both the artist and the child it was meant to address.

Before his death Tati called for his body to be thrown out with the garbage as through his own eyes his life had been a failure. He bemoaned to friends his misgivings and how through his own errors of judgment he would never experience the joy of being a grandparent. We have opened this painful chapter of our lives not out of any vengeance but so that we can now be allowed to lay to rest a previous generation’s mistakes, there is no spite only sorrow for what is ultimately a family tragedy. To fully appreciate an artist’s work you first must acknowledge the person and the life they had lived.

If the integrity of my grandfather’s work means anything to you then please take into account the wishes of his only three grandchildren who united stand loyally by their adored mother, the daughter he had heartlessly abandoned as a child and later addressed l’Illusionniste to. Together we ask that you please show moral compassion and chose in the future not to participate in the misrepresentation of our family history to suit the parasitic benefit of others. That Sylvain Chomet, Pathe Pictures, Sony Picture Classics and Les Films de Mon Oncle dare to rub my grandfather’s remorse on our doorstep without respectfully acknowledging the facts is intolerable. The truth deserves a voice so that at the very least we do not forget the sacrifices made by others for our liberty.

“On le pleure mort,il aurait fallu l’aider vivant”

–Paris Match 19th November 1982 Obituary of Jacques Tati.

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Amazon.com Widgets

Yours sincerely

Richard Tatischeff Schiel McDonald

John Prine: American Legend

On John Prine