Love/Hate with Irvin Kershner__In a quandry

I’m stumped. Last night I attended a double bill at the Cinefamily’s Silent Movie Theater which was being shown as an installment of their “Overlooked Auteurs” series; the night's offerings were being exhibited as examples of Irvin Kershner’s directorial talents. The first movie was titled Loving, a tight, explosive and perverse study of societal amorality among the middle-class during the late 1960’s. It starred George Segal and Eva Marie Saint among others and I found it scintillating; certainly the programmers at Cinefamily had unearthed a gem which had gone undetected by me and probably many others. During the intermission I spoke with a friend while replaying some scenes in my mind and becoming almost manic in praising the direction, cinematography (Gordon Willis), sequence construction, acting, screenplay. This is the essential pay-off for a film buff, to stumble upon a really good film you’ve never heard of and walk away ecstatic in its after-burn. If the evening had ended there, I’d be happy. No wiser perhaps, but definitely happier than I later became after watching the second listing of the night’s double bill. That movie was a Barbara Striesand vehicle titled Up the Sandbox, a political farce and one of the most painful screenings of my life. In my personal list of bad movies it ranks alongside Boxing Helena in its worthlessness. Certainly I would have walked out of the theater after 20 minutes if I wasn’t with a date who appeared to be interested in its quirky humor, which the Cinefamily flyer had touted as “Bunuelian.” Truly, I couldn’t keep from wiggling, sighing and even groaning in my perturbation, at one point I even had my fingers in my ears to protect myself from its consistently embarrassing dialogue and textual rim-shots.

Luckily, after the lights had gone up, we adjourned down the street to Canter’s for a deli treat and a long conversation, blessedly about other subjects than the movies we’d just seen. We tip-toed around the Irvin Kershner topic, knowing it was a rusty landmine of potential disagreement. Today, I checked a few quick sources (imdb, reviews from 1972), only to find that both movies ranked almost exactly the same in the imdb rating system (approx 6.4, or a modest success). I found many glowing blurbs from fans of Up the Sandbox, not idiotic effusions for Babs’ superstar status, but a combined and heartfelt thumbs-up—and if the reviews weren’t quite so singular in their praise, they weren’t universally terrible either. The same seemed to hold for the earlier film, Loving. It had both its supporters and its opponents on the fan base, and generally walked away with good critical reviews. Pauline Kael in the New Yorker, gave it a rave review in which she rather sagaciously claimed that “it looks at the failures of middle-class life without despising the people, it understands that they already despise themselves.”

So, there’s my dilemma: two films, both from the same director and similar crews, both films having fallen from sight, both commercial flops, both with their individual fans and detractors. For all intents and purposes (in the world at large), both films seem to be similar and of fairly equal value, and yet I personally believe one is enormously superior, while the other one remains a huge waste of time, a professional vanity project of ridiculous proportions, taking rather serious subject matter and profaning it in it’s slip-shod, infantile treatment of source material all in order to . . . what, create laughs? It wasn’t even funny, but merely embarrassing.

Being a movie fan is certainly a subjective business. Whereas I may accord Frank Perry high praise as a director, another movie buff might consider him a hack. But, if there are no concrete criteria for comparison or ultimate judgments, who’s to say that Forrest Gump is a good movie, or the sophomoric, artistically reprehensible piece of fluff which I may think it is? At the end of the day, all judgment is merely opinion with no more credence than one’s favorite flavor of milk shake at McDonald’s. Like politics under our present system, each vote is swayed by marketing departments, spin doctors, phony or misleading statistics making appeals to the mass fears and desires of it’s citizenry or audience. So to, Hollywood has always fed on the projected taste of its uncritical audience: foisting celebrity appeal as skilled acting, or offering rehashed screenplays as original ideas which speak to the moment. I suppose I’m humiliated to realize that it’s all merely entertainment, a distraction to keep us from actually thinking or participating with a general aim in sight--as much an opium for the masses as any crackpot sermon at a pulpit, and as virulent.

Which all brings me to this: what do professors, students, technical staff, critics, authors, publishers, archivists, and all the other professional members of the critical film world actually study? Is it all mere puffery and opinion? Is the dissection of the editing sequence in Psycho’s shower scene of any more value than studying a dream episode in Irvin Kershner’s Up the Sandbox? If technical virtuosity is equally at the beck-and-call of business executives to amass revenue, or artistic aspirations from truly concerned and idea driven film-makers, then “how it looks,” or production value is inherently meaningless. If formulaic pacing and iconic presentation of proven stimuli can create tears or laughs ala Spielberg’s E.T. or shrieks ala Tarantino’s latest offering, then aren’t we merely talking about emotional pornography? If box office receipts are used as an indicator of a film’s worth, or professional film critics’ opinions are held to be trusted indicators, how is a viewer to assess their own value judgment? An interesting page in each issue of Film Comment shows a graph of popular film reviewers from prestigious newspapers and magazines. Perhaps 10 film critics are asked each month to rate a list of new films which have been released with stars ranging from zero (a bomb) to 5 (a masterwork). The reputation of these critics is very high indeed, their backgrounds are indisputably professional, many write books which are used in university courses and have become canonical. And yet . . . none of these critics agree, even moderately about each month’s movies. It’s great fun to see Armond White or Manohla Dargis condemn a film as a bomb when the same film garners 4 and 5 stars by Andrew Sarris. What, we may rightfully ask, do these professionals use as criteria in their assessment of films. Why do each reach conclusions on the same movie which are so wildly different in their eventual rating? One may equally view art criticism in the same way, or philosophy, or poetry, or fiction, or music, and the list seems to include everything. So, where lies superiority? Or mediocrity? Or downright sham? I don't think I'm wrong to consider judgment important in each of our lives, going well beyond film. Why is Socialism condemned and republicanism revered? Why do we decide to give a homeless person a few dollars, or pass by? For people as insecure as myself, these aren’t mute points. Just what and where does one look for standards?

We may say that only natural sciences can be judged with any degree of veracity because they can be tested and proven as to efficacy and determinate usefulness. But is that even true? The FDA tested the arthritis medicine Vioxx as did other countries and found it safe. Deaths from the drug were later estimated at 28,000 on the low end to 200,000 on the high end. Guess scientific regimens aren’t as exact as we had thought. So, here I am at my computer steaming because I think a Barbara Streisand movie from 1972 is a bad film and take umbrage at anyone who disagrees. So what? Well, you can still buy Vioxx (or the same formula) on-line from Canada, and this is after documented proof of it’s terminal effects. So what? The U.S. voters donated over a $1,000,000,000.00 dollars to elect Obama as President on a ticket of “change,” of which there’s been none in sight. So what? We believe that the United States is the apex of industrialized nations, yet our infant mortality rate is only 29th in the world. So what? International film festivals and awards programs list hundreds of notable films from recognized world-class directors each year which are never released in the United States. So what? If Roshomon is no better or worse a film than the new Jim Carey movie, what difference does it matter if we selectively keep foreign films from our screens? And just who is to say that the Jim Carey movie isn’t the best movie ever made? It wouldn’t take much effort to find such opinions on imdb, or at the water cooler at work. But who cares?

See, I’m tired of being a snob—the guy who doesn’t watch the latest American uber-hero movie . I want to finally agree with someone, at least once in a while. I don’t want to try convincing my friends that Guru Dutt’s 1957 Pyassa is a truly inspired work of art, when I know that they’d dislike the subtitles, guffaw at the low production value, blow raspberries at the songs. I suppose I could get a better caliber of friends, but I have to beg just to keep the few I have. Snobs aren’t much fun. I’d like to say I can enjoy, or at least disregard Babs playing a Jewish super-mom of limited means in a sequence shot in Africa where a hundred or so black women are topless with spears and beads doing some silly Colonial era dance to convince we in the audience that they’re truly “natives,”—though I didn’t see any with fake bones through their noses, I wouldn’t rule it out—I swear I could feel Angela Davis off screen aiming a rifle at our actress/producer; or a picket line of Nation of Islam members wondering why white people hate them so much. No, I’m afraid Irvin Kershner and Barbara Streisand should be brought up on charges of terrible taste, racism, sexism, jingoism, the worst face of pseudo-feminism ever brought to the screen and be judged harshly. But worse still, it was so damnably boring. I didn’t care a whit about one character in the entire cast, nor apparently did the screenwriter or director. Maybe I don’t understand the big picture. Perhaps it was just a joke that didn’t fly . . . for 97 of the longest minutes I’ve ever lived.

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