June 19th 2013. Pick Of The Day.
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Film Forum's massive trib to master filmmaker Yasujiro Ozu merrily skips through its second week, today offering the auteur's EARLY SUMMER and TOKYO CHORUS. The former focuses on the changing postwar culture in Japan as particularly regards the practice of arranged marriage, and netted yet another Kinema Jumpo, or Best Picture award, for its maker. The latter details the descent of Tokihiko Okada's depression era office worker to sandwich board carrier, and is accompanied by Steve Sterner's sterling piano. Both worthy, but a different office worker shakes up his cutthroat milieu today, so I must pass.
MoMA's equally impressive retrospective, Allan Dwan and the Rise and Decline of the Hollywood Studios, features nearly every surviving effort from the cinematic pioneer's CV. Today we get EAST SIDE, WEST SIDE and STAGE STRUCK. George O'Brien's orphaned boxer's efforts to find his true father forms the plot of EAST/WEST, while STAGE features Gloria Swanson in the exact same SALOME sequences Billy Wilder co-opted for SUNSET BOULEVARD. Hate to pick against these two, but Billy Wilder himself steals my Pick this day. Argue with him.
The Mid-Manhattan Library's summer film series, 1970's: New York City On Film, today offers the quintessential blaxploitation classic SUPER FLY, featuring Ron O'Neal as the titluar badass and Curtis Mayfield laying down perhaps the most iconic soundtrack the genre's ever seen. No 35mm screenings at the library but this is an excellent program of movies, so I endorse it but pass up the two hours with one of the great cinematic mofo's all-time. One of the cinema's great milquetoasts, instead, takes my Pick today, and could only have been essayed by the one and only Jack Lemmon.
John Uhler Lemmon III first greeted an audience after his mother birthed him in an elevator. Why does that seem incredibly appropriate? He chose not to follow his father into the doughnut biz (I'm not making any of this up) and instead focused on an acting career postwar. After studying with the legendary Uta Hagen he found frequent work in TV and radio, but got his big screen break with the Judy Holliday vehicle IT SHOULD HAPPEN TO YOU. The following year he was cast by John Ford, then eventually directed by Joshua Logan, in the screen version of MISTER ROBERTS, and walked off with the first of his two little gold guys for his kinetic perf as Ensign Pulver. A career, and a persona, was born. Lotsa people think Jack Lemmon only did Jack Lemmon in every role, like some peeps think Jack Nicholson only ever did/does Jack Nicholson. While I agree that some actors disappear into roles completely and some shape the part to their particular charisma, I don't think the latter deserves scorn from fans of the former. Lemmon may indeed have always played Lemmon throughout a long and storied career, if that's your take, but some actors have the ability to bend the part to their particular ego, and deliver brilliant perfs more often that not. You can't, for instance, say that Lemmon's perf in SAVE THE TIGER was a carbon copy of his perf in SOME LIKE IT HOT, just as his turn in GLENNGARRY GLENN ROSS is not a clone of his work on THE DAYS OF WINE AND ROSES. He may never disappear into a character the way an Alec Guinness, or a Gary Oldman, may choose or have chosen to, but that doesn't mean the work is lazier of the end result any less impressive.
I focus on Lemmon being Lemmon because in Hollywood's growing fascination in the postwar era with amoral characters and duplicitous scenario Jackie boy had the ability to sell an audience what may otherwise have been a character irredeemable. From pests like ROBERTS' Pulver to SOME LIKE IT HOT's ruthless opportunist to WINE AND ROSES' degenerate addict, he never let the audience lose sight of the character's worth, never completely alienated paying crowds to the point where you couldn't care a jot about their redemption. In short he always had hold of your empathy, and it was all due to that tremendous charisma, and there quite possibly exists no finer example of that charisma employed in the service of selling the audience on a despicable lowlife, and in maintaining our desire to see this otherwise creep win his soul back, than his key-lending quasi-pimp in one of frequent collaborator Billy Wilder's out-and-out masterpieces. Films don't come much better than this, and Lemmon never essayed a better Lemmon.
Jack Lemmon and a little starlet named Shirley MacLaine star in Billy Wilder's Oscar-hoarding THE APARTMENT for the next three days at 1:30pm as part of MoMA's ongoing Auteurist History of Film series. The doughnut industry's loss is the Cinegeek's gain.
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