Reviews

I usually abide by that Beverly Hills Player maxim, "Reward or ignore; never punish." But sometimes I just =have= to vomit. So shoot me.

Can we say "erratic?" Can we say "histrionic?" Dare we say "gay?"

And I'm not even talking about the movie yet. The movie, at least, actually has some moments, mostly when Cher is actually allowed to =be=... like Cher, as well as when Stanley Tucci is on screen.

But some of the reviews here (as is often the case with "diva flicks" like this) are what I'd call "hopefully projective" (of circumstances that don't actually exist), "delusionally enthusiastic," or maybe just confused and commenting on the wrong film.

Aguilera is still in Disneyland. She =is= a fine (if over-reaching, even over-killing) vocal technician and stage performer, but willful reality suspension will be required to buy her characterization. Which is probably the director's fault, as much as her acting coach's. (I hear Stella Adler barking, "Stop ACTING!")

The same director wrote the script (and evidently liked his own work), so I get why it's as cheesy as it is.

This movie actually =did= make "Showgirls" look intriguing by contrast. (I would never have watched this and did manage to get a few other things done while cutie pie had it on. Even she looked perplexed at the end.)

I do appreciate how valuable the premium channels are now. We get to see that we are not the only people who bat about .250 in life.

If I was looking at "Shame" from across a river that separated it from my own Alfie-gone-Carnal-Knowledge life experience, I expect I'd be a lot more tossed, wrenched, wound, or enthused.

McQueen did his homework: He knows the cycle of abuse, and that's pretty much what we're watching here. He understands that the addict has to use again to manage his withdrawal symptoms. He understands that sex is no different from booze or coke or peanut butter pies in the eyes of a particular beholder. He even (appears to) understand that sex is really a matter of tolerance to several drugs (dopamine, testosterone, progesterone, adrenaline, oxytocin and more) for which no commerce is required.

And there's probably some emperor-missing-his-toga stuff going on here, along with an urge to warn the world about his own discoveries and anxieties thereabout. "If =I= have them, what about the rest of you?" And he's surely right; how many guys do you know who'd give up an arm or a leg (some time in the future) to knock 'em over like Brandon here?

But I'm not looking at this from across the river; I'm looking at it from 40 years of previously untreated experience. And =no= one I know would have figured me for a Michael Cain or a Jack Nicholson, save for a few of the more enlightened victims and the wise men and women mentioned further down. Watching Fassbinder was like looking at a security video of a hipper, 75th and 2nd Ave. rendition of my life until a few years ago.

And I'm pretty sure I'm far from being the only guy on this side of the stream. But because I am where I am about it now, I can look at "Shame" as what it is: A little too heavy-handed, duplicitously moralistic, wordlessly preachy, shot from inside the paradigm, and probably plenty useful for those who are still living inside, as well.

It looked to me like McQueen was about to get it here and there were it not for the common cult-ure's dichotomous, schizophrenogenic, crazy-making values about sex and romance, that Brandon (and all the rest of us) would have been unlikely to be so obsessed about the stuff. But there was so much money to be made from =both= of the polarities, wasn't there? A little Vegas here; a little Nashville there. Flip back and forth from the mid-300s to the 500s on DirecTV any evening. There's no crazy-making behavioral conditioning going on there. No. None at all.

I'd have been stuck in the muck of mystery for another 40 years if I hadn't run into Anne Wilson Schaef, Pia Mellody, Ed Khantsian, Phil Shaffer, Pat Carnes, Dennis Donovan and Alan Marlat. But meeting Jules Henry, Ron Laing, Greg Bateson, Don Jackson, et al well after they'd expired was the clincher. And here's the deal on "Shame" for the Cognoscenti reading Clinical Psychiatry News: It looks to me like McQueen knows the first group, but probably not the second.

Sex addiction is like all other addictions. It's a game, and it's a business. There are game pieces and game players. It produces immense profits for those who know the rules. (Start with "variable schedule of reinforcement," "polarizing reality," and the combined role of the nucleus accumbens and the ventral tegmentum.)

Get past all the purposely confusing, socializing, normalizing =ideas= about sex and romance (including the many in this film), and one can De-Shame sufficiently to get re-balanced and neither be fearful of, nor obsessed with, sex. (The problem is almost always in the words we take for reality. Hey! They're only words.) Most people, however, will only see this film from one side of the moral river or the other. The cult-ure is set up like that, but =real= -- rather than =reel= -- life is actually not.

Recall the MTv video for Tom Petty's "Into the Great Wide Open," Johnny Depp's "Eddie Rebel" and Faye Dunaway's would-be talentmeister. Rocket to Stardom. Everybody's got their knobs on "11." Where's the next new face, the next new pair of legs, the next new set of…?

Pieces and players in the utterly denied, approval-seeking chess game we play up here back of the sign. We think we really =are= soooooooooo clever and on top of our… games. But we're just as obviously duplicitous, manipulative, competitive, seductive, jealous, petty, stimulation-obsessed and stupid when we're stoned as those people on Whittier or Budlong.

We all run around declaiming that narcissism (as well as our determination to stay that way). But the instant an opportunity comes our way, the money's down. Everybody north of Ventura or east of Lankershim wants to =be= us. Or what they think we are. They should watch this first.

Beckinsale =should= do more films like this (and she has). Francis should, too (and she does).

Okay; now that all that's out of my system: This is an okay little art house piece actors and directors love to make to look at how people say this and do that. And then drive their little yellow school buses full of curious but confused, rule-bound but over-excited inner children over the cliff. In this one, at least, the characters "take responsibility" for the consequences the way people in Beverly Hills tend to… and then go right back to whatever it was they were doing to jack their lives up.

Boredom is just the very worst thing one can admit to up here. And I really need to see a film like this every now and again.

Four friends wanted to go see it. All four of them were relatively unaffected, both emotionally and intellectually. None of them had had any personal experience, either in a cult or in lengthy, close involvement with a ex-member. I have. Both. Which was why I was motivated to see the film.

Understanding the nature of emotional seduction, value and belief manipulation, veiled threat of both fear of abandonment and abuse, social proof and group-think as I now do, however, I was struck here by the extent to which the script writer understood =some= cult dynamics (to the exclusion of =many= others). But that understanding was repeatedly demonstrated in ways most people without previous exposure or at least intellectual understanding would be able to grasp.

The Pavlovian and Skinnerian behavioral conditioning of Martha et al's mind made sense to =me=, but not at all to my friends. Seeing it through their eyes to the extent that I could, it was evident to me (once again) that mind control is simply too extensive a topic to be treated as obliquely as it is here. One needs something a bit more heavy-handed; say, Kubrick's "Clockwork Orange" or TV's "Desperate Housewives," where the cause-and-effect relationships are more concretely demonstrated.

A lab rat in one of research psychologist Martin Seligman's boxes with an electrified floor, Martha learns to pull the lever for food =and= accept the occasional shocks that go along with the reward. But how many people know about such things?

Martha et al's (I say that because of her obvious threat-induced splitting into both guru-assigned and reactive personas in classic, borderline-organization-inducing, PTSD fashion) dis-integration and confused attachment is there for anyone who understands such stuff to see, but it's just too ephemerally presented for the average person to make sense of.

She walked onto the farm without a fully formed sense of identity and left with one that was fully fractured and something like an affection- seeking, but abuse-fearing, hostile and hissing house cat. I'm clear that all of the psychodynamic concepts I've floated in this review mean little or nothing to most people. Script writers need to keep that in mind when -- as they so often do -- rip off the DSM or the ICD for character development.

While I am willing to agree with the one reviewer here who takes Luis to task for staging a somewhat lopsided revision of history, I'm surprised at the 6.4 rating for this very artfully laid out rundown of the Sleepy Lagoon screwiness in wartime LA. My father was in fact one of the sheriff's deputies involved. His version was understandably authoritarian and legalistic. But all that aside...

This is the best examination I've ever seen or even heard of regarding the psyche of the Mexican-American gang bangers on the east side of that dry wash that separated the fix-is-in boys downtown from the second- and third-generation campesinos of mid-century SoCal. I went to Woodrow Wilson Junior & High School in El Sereno. There is nothing in Eddie James's =stunning= (to me, anyway) real-ization of "El Pachuco" that is off the mark. Nada. He had the peculiar, paranoid-delusional, narcissistic-machismo, defense mechanism menudo of the vato loco =down=, ese.

And anyone who understands even a =little= of what it really means to be =Hispanically= antisocial in hyper-starched khakis & Sir Guys =or= peg pants & porkpies -- and =dig= it -- ought to be fascinated. (Go see the outfits some of the guys in El Chicano, Tierra and Thee Midnighters are sporting to this day.)

Lalo Guerrero's "Marijuana Boogie" and the rest of the "bop" lend further flavor to this nifty little play-turned-film. Watch it =carefully=. Valdez's script is subtle. This is sophisticated trabajo.

Limited "cult following" status to the contrary, I'm not surprised at the 5.9 rating by the 1,500 odd voters accustomed to the current marginal (and copy cat) plots, limbic manipulations, clichéd special effects and derivative nature of post-millennial film-making. This, after all, is a Monty Pythonesque rendition of a Terry Southern novel (see "Candy," "Barbarella," "Easy Rider," "The Loved One" and "Dr. Strangelove…").

(Would those who beat their brains senseless by pounding on their PDAs and X Boxes know the truth if it bit them in the nose? Please.)

Southern saw the culture for what it is… and has been since the Old Kingdom on the Nile five thousand years ago. "Money talks." Most of us want to believe we care about AIDS in Central Africa, the starving in Dafur, the oppressed in Lybia, the fate of the Tibetans, the fate of the over-populated, under-educated, over-heated, radiation-poisoned =planet=. But what we really care about is comfort, and what it takes to purchase however much of it we believe to be our due.

Born in Alvarado, Texas, and strained through the sifter of military experience in World War II, Southern was no "hippie." He was far more down with Marquand, Richler, Kerouac, Ginsberg, Burroughs, Sartre and Camus than the histrionic, wanna-be-hip, but discipline-bereft and chemically crop-sprayed pseudo-intellectuals of the late '60s and early '70s.

If you're into psychology, think Bateson, Baumrind, Berne, Ellis, Fairbairn, Henry, Jackson, Karpman, Klein, Laing, Miller, Schaef and Sullivan rather than Bradshaw, Dyer, Forward, Harris, McGraw and Schlesinger, for example. If you're into music lyrics, think Lennon, Morissette, Olazabal and Townshend rather than Hayward, Jagger, Lynne and Tyler.

That there are people in the world who can buy the behavior of virtually anyone, including those who =appear= to be "powerful," may continue to make many folks squirm. We'd like to believe in truth, justice, freedom and the Easter Bunny. That Vegas doesn't fix major sports events, that doctors know best, and the Supreme Court doesn't steal elections. But… money talks.

In "TMC," that particular message is packaged a bit heavy-handedly at moments, but the piece can be as beguiling – and actually meaningful – as the similarly rompy "Rocky Horror Picture Show," "The Meaning of Life," "The Producers," "Blazing Saddles," and "Network," if one knows how to pry their mind open for 92 minutes in some (ahem) appropriate way.

Well, call me "histrionic" (hahahahaha), but... I'm watching it just now for perhaps the third or fourth time since I was seven or eight years old. I was dumbstruck by it then. I guess she was, too. I met her 20 years later. She'd literally made herself into this character. The woman men will do anything for. We took her marriage apart then, and took one of mine apart 15 years later.

Well, she wanted to be stimulated, and I evidently did it as well as anyone for a time, even though I was no James Mason, Clark Gable or even Leslie Howard.

Today, I am a devotee of direct, wordless experience. And there is much to be directly experienced right =now=. "And to have found her faithless!" So I "killed all that I loved," and shut myself off from that much life after so many years of trying to find it again. "Faith is a lie, and God himself is chaos!" "He will find no woman faithful and fair." "Would I sail alone 'til doomsday?"

Bewitched (or =something=) by all this drama, I suffered as he did for 35 years... until I put my wordless consciousness into the oven and used this film again to be "there" with her.

Regardless of what anyone else thinks, P&TFD is a ten for me =personally=, even if it is a product of its time and a pretty fair attempt to follow in the footsteps of George Bernard Shaw. The melancholy may dearly love it. But those who need to work their way through a "timeless love" may find the keys to their prison cells right here.

I'm forced by conscience to admit right off that I've been a complete sap for Vivien Leigh since the moment I laid eyes on her sitting between the "Tarlton Twins" on the steps at Twelve Oaks in the opening seconds of GWTW. But in decades of looking to find that =particular= Vivien Leigh again, I was everlastingly frustrated.

I found over time that I had fallen for the Vivien the Vixen, the face that could send men happily off to (civil) war in delirious dreams of marching home to her and "happily ever after" ...and the cocksure certainty of precisely that effect upon any man who dared to gaze into that face for more than a few seconds.

One wonders how much she was aware of the thermonuclear force of that face in real life. Olivier is gone, and so is she, so we'll probably never know. But we do know this: Vivien's best friend as a youngster was the formidable -- and slightly older -- Maureen O'Sullivan, she of "Tarzan the Apeman," and no lightweight herself when it came to bowling men over.

While there are hints of Scarlet in Vivien in "Waterloo Bridge" and "That Hamilton Woman," none of the other films I know of allow her to be the manipulative, coercive, self-obsessed, narcissistic, pouting diva that she was as Libby and Scarlet.

Had Selznick seen rushes or scenes from "Sideawalks..." before or after he cast Leigh in her legend maker? Did he see Scarlet right there in black and white? One wonders. Because Libby =is= Scarlet O'Hara regardless of the surrounding scenery and cockney word-chewing.

The similarities do not end there. Virtually every expression and and mannerism is fully formed and on display in Libby the busker =and= Libby the diva. Harrison is a more sophisticated, straightforward and cynical version of Leslie Howard's Ashley Wilkes. And Thomas Mitchell's Gerald O'Hara looks and sounds a =lot= like Lawton's Charlie Staggers.

I'm forced to think that Selznick =did= see "Sidewalks..." and that he saw it far more than once. But in whatever event, those who caught the Viv bug as badly as I did years ago should be pleased to see her living right up to our expectations after so many other relative disappointments.

This is Costner's third film about baseball that is not about baseball. "Bull Durham" and "Field of Dreams" were not films about baseball either. These are films about life for which baseball is simply a staging area.

I don't think most people could possibly understand that many, though not all, of the people who are really competent at a sport that's as mental as baseball are just really, competent =people=. Billy Chapel is one of them.

Billy wins game after game and strikes out batter after batter because he understands the competition and because he is totally =committed= to his role in it. He also know's people's limitations and =that= their limitations are the simple results of the common cultural beliefs.

Like his trainer, Jane is no dummy; she's creative, capable and competent. But she is also "common." She believes the common cultural beliefs. "I am not good enough." "He is what he is (what I project him to be). I am what I am (not good enough)." On a very good day, less than five percent of the people think like Billy. On a good day no =less= than 95 percent of the people think like Jane.

=I= would find it very effortful to "love" a woman like Jane. But Billy understands and does the best he can with her. How it'll turn out in the long run is anyone's guess.

All three films in Costner's baseball trilogy are of the culture, as well. They suffer from the same American cultural unwillingness to tolerate unresolved conflicts.

I'd be willing to push out my little stack of chips on a bet that Warren Beatty understood the concept of "cause addiction" back in '81. Like addictions to sex, gambling, work, the Internet and exercise, it's an obsession with a particular form of activity because one appraises that activity as highly valuable. One's appraisals are driven by one's core beliefs, values and convictions, and the emotions those beliefs, values and convictions promote.

In John Reed's (actual) case, a rich young man for whom survival was not really an issue hooked up with a lot of post-Enlightenment, mid-19th-century, German philosophy and became "idealistic" and morally "utopian." But being a product of the either-or, all-or-nothing, mental paradigms of his day, Reed lost whatever sense of objectivity he might have picked up. And got stuck in that place a lot of people get stuck when lose sense of two basic truths: There's no free lunch, and everything comes at a price.

Many during the final decade of the "Evil Empire" of monolithic anti-capitalism didn't care for "Reds" much. Any film that made as much noise as that one did about "American oil companies trying to get to the fields near Baku" (imagine that) was bound to inspire the discomfort of certain parties. 1981 was not 2010, and Beatty's neither-all-good-nor-all-bad, post-modern take on Reed and his "cause" pretty much flew right over the heads of many viewers.

And that's why it's hard for me to see "Reds" as being in the same league with films like "Network" or "Charlie Wilson's War." As was the case with "Lawrence of Arabia," Beatty's got a film full of informative messages here, but in trying to cram them all into this "epic," many of them get lost.

Revolutions may gain their energy from idealism, but they tend to accomplish their ends at the point of a gun. And people given to using guns may have ideas =other= than the idealistic ones. France in the 1790s. Cuba in the 1950s and '60s. The Confederacy in the 1850s and '60s. China in the late '40s. Germany in the 1920s and '30s. Russia in the 1910s.

The Russian culture had been given to extreme authoritarianism for centuries before the labor movement there began to gain traction in the late 1800s. Much as was the case in the American labor movement a bit later on, idealism was fed to the workers by those who wished to enlist them for their own purposes. The authoritarian leaders of the movement acted little differently than the authoritarian leaders of the Czar's government.

"Here's to the new boss; same as the old boss." Beatty misses none of this in "Reds." But I'm not sure that many viewers were able to get that in the midst of all the dramatizing.

Oh, well.

I didn't read all the other reviews, but I did read about ten. And never saw the words "child abuse" anywhere. The modern-day reader has Alice Miller and Bruce Perry to turn to. And films like Stephen Frears gut-wrenching "Liam."

Dickens wasn't the greatest novelist of his time for no reason. He saw the human condition and reported it =as= he saw it. Here he sees the sadism of the "professional pedagogues" of Calvinistic, mid-Victorian England and how it manifests in the battering of children who, of course, grow up themselves to be sadistic batterers. (Well, =duh=.) He also sees the results in other children.

"It's good for them. Toughen's them up!" Yeeeah. Well...

For anyone who knows the topic, Freddie Bartholomew's portrayal is tough to watch. Bartholomew's face contorts in terror as he is =terrorized= by the monstrous pedagogue, Mr. Murstone, played to the then-contemporary stylistic hilt of viciousness by Basil Rathbone... and again as he forced to drink castor oil and otherwise abused by the great witch-mistress, Margaret Hamilton (or someone who looks greatly like her).

"Copperfield" has been made into a feature film three times that I know of. Let's hope it's made three or four more times. In a culture normalized to the "ownership" and "righteous punishment" of "bad" children (never mind =why= they may have become "bad" at the hands of bullies at home and elsewhere in the neighborhood), most people could stand to see this film a dozen times.

Thank Irving Thalberg and George Cukor, here. Both had the sensitivity to want to make this important film and do it =well= at a studio that usually wasn't into "social awareness" films, Louis Mayer's MGM.

If this is an attempt to deliver "the truth about the CIA" (or "shadow government"), no one's going to care. AMC's terrifically sophisticated and artful "Mad Men" and "Breaking Bad" may, in fact, be =hurt= by the art-LESS promotion of this unremittingly dull, stereotypic, wearisome, two-dimensional... (I could go on, but by now, I expect you get the point).

Unless or until the writers are themselves dropped off the end of some pier in cement shoes and replaced with people who understand the three C's: that Characters need Charisma to be Cared about (which MM & BB have in spades), all the foggy, dank, manipulative, caught-between-a-rock-and-a-hard-place pseudo-evil one can come up with will do little other than remind people that even if the government has fallen into the hands of the fascists, they still have personal power over their remote controls... and they can use it.

I don't know who was making the programming decisions at AMC relative their original series development, but maybe he or she is either on sabbatical, gloating over past successes, or quit and moved on after hitting a pair out of the park. (Interesting how this happened at ABC after "Desperate Housewives" and "Grey's Anatomy," though "Ugly Betty" is, if trite, at least the sort of mass market pablum that "works" for the media-(de-)mentalized.)

But, I will say this: I'd be mildly interested to know the real story =behind= this turkey... if you keep it short. Did the "big boys" at AMC get a telephone call at home from the =really= Big Boys? Hahaha.

The late George Crile was a really interesting guy. He might not have recalled the encounter, 'cause I just sat there trying to gather it all in over coffee with his equally over-the-top PR guy. George had been Down In It.

George was Washington Editor of Harper's Magazine. In addition to Harper's, his articles were published in The Washington Monthly, New Times (a short-lived, national truth teller 30 years ago), The Washington Post, and The New York Times. He got in a lot of hot water in the '70s for producing a CBS documentary on the CIA's secret wars from the '50s to that time.

George spent a lot of time with Charlie. George wrote the book the film was based on.

Just as "Lawrence..." (if carefully attended) explains the historical underpinnings of what we've been watching on CNN for the past decade, so does this (if watched carefully).

The cultural "normalizers" have (expectedly) lined up to take cheap shots at "CWW." And the =normalized= will believe what they're told to.

But the cat's so far out of the bag now on the far right, big natural resources and the CIA (read Peter Dale Scott, Alfred McCoy, Warren Hinckle, et al) that Nichols can make movies like this and sleep comfortably... even if he still has to do them "over the top" like his own "Catch-22."

Compare the films Elvis made before he went in the Army with those he made afterward. In "Love Me Tender," "Loving You," "Jailhouse Rock" and "King Creole," Elvis was a whole lot closer to =Elvis= as he'd been in the era of the "Louisianna Hayride," "Stage Show," "The Milton Berle Show," "Your Hit Parade" and "The Steve Allen Show."

The famous cell block dance skit may have been choreographed, but it's still closer to the Elvis of "Heartbreak Hotel" and "Hound Dog" -- and thus, to the Elvis that "changed the world" in '56 -- than to anything he did in front of a camera until the "comeback special" in 1968.

I've heard a few people assert that Col. Tom went along with Elvis going in the Army to "clean him up" and "make him more controllable and palatable to the establishment." Anyone who's read James Dickerson's book on the relationship between The King and The Colonel may well agree.

But in whatever event, "Jailhouse Rock" provides compelling evidence that the Elvis of 1968-1975 or so was no "invention." That Elvis was the logical development of the Elvis of 1955-1958... the one you can look at with your own eyes right here.

My review is #240 of 240, so I'm not exactly expecting it to be seen by very much of anyone... and that may be a good thing.

Like most of the other reviewers, I get the forecasting of future TV programming, pandering to the lowest common denominator, etc., even though the early days of cable showed us that the entertainment- and information-driven imperative was still alive in the decade that followed. In the end, of course, the marketing- and profit-driven imperatives won out on most cable channels, as well. Save for AMC, TCM and a very few others, pandering continues to be profitable, and if a network is publicly owned. (Okay; so much for the high cost of capitalism.)

I'm less interested in that than in calling attention to the specific information Chayefsky chose to impart from the lips of his two principle truth-tellers: Peter Finch's Howard Beale and Ned Beatty's Arthur Jensen. The viewer who listens carefully -- and, okay, from an informed perspective -- will hear some of the most accurate "realpolitik" ever in a widely distributed, "major" motion picture.

Beale's existential angst sounds like his muse was some well-grounded combination of Friedrich Nietzsche and Noam Chomsky on a good day. Jensen's stunning, five-minute disquisition on international corporatism was similarly rooted in accurate and current reality.

Folks given to reading authors like Sartre, Camus, Tillich and Heidegger will hear their views spewing from the lips of the newscaster gone (ostensibly) over the dam. Folks given to reading authors like P. D. Scott, Al Gore, Warren Hinckle, William Turner and Alfred McCoy will hear them in the spellbinding chairman of the board.

Beyond that, the subplot about the network's parent company being in jeopardy of being taken over by the Saudi's who've been keeping the outfit afloat is the stuff of all manner of offshore turkey buzzards coming to roost in early '91 and just about ever since.

Chayefsky knocked out a number of interesting scripts, including those for "Altered States," "The Hospital" (with George C. Scott) and "Marty" (Ernie Borgnine's career-maker), but this would be almost anyone's tour de force. It's right there in a pigeonhole close to "Dr. Strangelove," "Apocalypse Now" and "The Gangs of New York" for surreal renditions of discomfiting, social reality.

Welllllll... what's going on here is that George Axelrod was fascinated with the =very= unusual adolescent culture in Beverly Hills and environs in the immediately pre-hippie era. (So was Terry Southern, btw, and this smacks =heavily= of "Southernism.")

What Axelrod (and I) saw first-hand that makes this make sense to those who =were= there is the rampant narcissism and manipulative sophistication that were so common among the children of such rampantly narcissistic and sophisticatedly manipulative parents.

Kids =do= (believe it or not) tend to imitate their role models. And what we have here is not only the slick kids, but the confused and bamboozled ones whose parents, not surprisingly, are "traditionalists," Ruth Gordon's very entertaining parody notwithstanding.

"LLaD" may overshoot the target here and there, and surely lacks the finesse Kubrick would have injected, but it =was= the fundament of Tuesday Weld's longstanding rep around town as the =original= Sharron Stone. (And one does wonder after seeing this and other Weld vehicles how many of them Stone studied.)

If "LLaD" doesn't know from one scene to the next whether it's a romp or a tragedy, it's lack of genre identity seems to suit the film's similarity to (and possible influence by) much of Russ Meyer's work of the same period. (One is never sure whether Meyer is lecturing the viewer on the wages of sin or j*****g him off... and the same can be said about this softer-core assault on culturally "normal" values and sensibilities.)

I =like= this movie (as did Roger Ebert), and if you're as able to jump out of the culturally paradigmatic box as I like to think I am on a good day, you'll probably be as intrigued with this oddly voyeuristic look into the way things (sometimes) really were (and still are) in Beverly Hills, Brentwood and Bel Air as I was.

All you have to do is read the script. You know when you do whether or not you can =identify= with the characters and the =drama= between them. It's really that simple.

Now. The director =can= screw it all up. But with actors as far into Stella Adler and Harold Klurman as Spacey and Jackson, and who have as much on the ball as they both do, =I= could have directed this, and it would have worked.

Fortunately, I did not direct this film. And a bad-a** with a 'hood-a-tude who knows the boys in blue are often just soldiers in the WASP mafia =did=. So when =he= read the script, he identified with it, too.

Then it just comes down to discipline and technical skill. Gray might never have worked at this level before, but he was ready to do so when he got the call.

This is a real clean film about another real dirty department. It's on the toob occasionally, but really worth renting.

BBJ was over the top, and ignorant of both the cause of the problems and of the racial divisiveness that was actually the case in the inner city schools of the mid-'50s. I know. I was there.

The American inner city was in transition. The "better" white families were migrating to the 'burbs. The "niggers" and the "spics" (words =used= in this film and not bleeped out, so...) were moving in. The school yard went prison yard. The dynamics were little different.

The War changed everything. Dad may or may not have made it back. And when he did, he may have been hitting the bottle pretty hard... and hitting his old lady and his kids even harder. (We may prefer "The Best Years of Our Lives" rendition of the late '40s, but it wasn't like that in Loopy Chicago or East LA.) The white kids may have had fathers who drank. The "spics" may have had fathers who smoked refer and acted like "El Pachuco" in "Zoot Suit." (You can find it here on IMDb.) The "negroes" may have had no fathers at all. Pali High in '65 it wasn't.

In whatever event, a lot of kids weren't all that happy... and they tended to band together in packs for protection. (Here's where BBJ is well off the mark: The classrooms here are full of Hispanics, African American and whites who actually communicate. I'm sorry, but this was =not= the case in the real world.) Nor, save on rare occasions, did the kids openly assault their teachers. Their fathers (or mothers, if they were Black) would beat the snot out of them if they did. But they assaulted each other =plenty=. And usually along either racial gang, car club or other wolf pack lines.

BBJ =does= call attention to a problem. But on any sort of massive scale, what's shown here didn't take place in reality until the cocaine and crack pandemic of the 1980s. Hard drugs tend to disinhibit people. The paranoia-driven-anger in between their ears (owing to problems at home =and= at school) is released.

My father was the sergeant in charge of the Los Angeles County Juvenile Courts from 1957 to 1967. I thought I might follow in his footsteps, but after 34 years with the sheriff's office, he had a better idea. He saw what was coming, and he didn't need a movie to tell him about it.

Truffaut and Moussy understood the parental abandonment (and abuse) of children more or less as famed author Alice Miller (Prisoners of Childhood, For Your Own Good, Thou Shalt Not Know) understood it.

Miller saw millions of children being raised by parents with all manner of narcissistic obsessions that prevented them from living =for= their children, believing instead (as had probably been the case with their =own= parents) that the children lived to serve =them= and not the other way around. Miller's research (at about the time this film was made) revealed that raising children to be "farm animals" had been a cultural norm in Northern Europe for centuries.

Truffaut and Moussy knew it wasn't occasional or just "here and there," and that it was a pandemic in the working class of their time. "You've been so hard on him," his phlegmatic (and codependent) father says to his mother. "He's always a problem," says the self-involved, sexpot madre.

To them both, however, he's little more than an inconvenience in their lives. So long as he does his chores and stays out of trouble, he is viewed by them both as "merely tolerable." He gets no attention (or rewards) (or reinforcement) from being "good," so... he goes "rotten" and becomes the center of his parents' lives.

"Juvenile delinquency" was a relatively new phenomenon in the West in the '50s. And a lot of noise was being made about it at the time. This is simply Truffaut's explanation of it as the expectable result of combining working class slavery with the "grab the brass ring" expectations sold by the media.

It was "big news" to filmgoers in those days. For many, it =still= is.

Bernard Malamud may or may not have "known" baseball; I dunno. But what I =do= know is that he knew people. Read his other work and one can see that Bernie was Kafka's and Dostoyevsky's not-so-fair-haired boy. Which is to say that he also knew "darkness and light" and the perils of getting in too deep with the Powers that Be.

Most of the scenes in "The Natural" are "dark" or "light." Barry Levinson lights all the baseball scenes =up=. And most of the interpersonal action =down=. Levinson had surely read not only "The Natural" but "The Fixer," as well. Malamud was an obsessive moralist, ya know. He saw the "bad guys" and like the muckrakers of the turn of the century he had to turn the light on =them=.

"They have to know what they world is really like... that it's not that fairy tale the 'big boys' want you to think it is." Even baseball.

A good women. Two bad women. A good man. Some bad men.

"Life didn't turn out the way I expected it," he tells the good woman. Another confused man in a confusing world, regardless of how =competent= he is at his chosen endeavor.

A metaphor for the way things are and not the way they are not?

My theory on why we almost lost this one (most of the prints were destroyed in the '30s):

The Great War all but destroyed what was left of a French Enlightenment and democratic tradition that was little more than 150 years old. The culture that had spawned Descartes, Focault, Rousseau and Napoleon was in decline well =before= the huns charged across Flanders in 1914, but it was in a moral, spiritual and financial power-dive and headed down the road into a civil war between the urban socialists and communists vs. the urban and rural landholding, wealthy, ultra-conservative fascists in 1928.

The Holy Roman Church retained its power in the provinces, but as urbanization spread, France was splitting into a polarized culture of progressive, anti-clerical urbanites who watched films and listened to the radio… and traditionalistic – and politically conservative -- peasants. The great landowners of the northeast had been all but ruined by the Great War, and it would be some time before they held the political power they'd had until 1914.

French politics involved endless battles between labor unions and manufacturers in the cities. Fascism was on the rise, but it was a listless, reactive, passionless sort, as opposed to all the excitement in Italy and Germany at the time. The modern viewer may do well to understand this as he or she watches "The Passion…" For this is a film of metaphors.

The Paris intellectuals of the '20s saw Benedict 15th, and Pius 10th, 11th and 12th during the early part of the 20th century as the popes and anti-popes of Joan's day.

Joan of Arc had "led" the pro-papist ("conservative") French forces that installed pro-papist king Charles 7th to the throne during the Hundred Years War against the English in the early 15th century. She may have been canonized for her role in "saving France for Holy Roman Church," but she is also seen by many in France as the savior of the culture in the face of a very serious foreign threat.

Some saw French politics in the '20s and '30s as strikingly parallel to the politics of Joan's time. A prisoner of his very divided College of Cardinals (many from the Central Powers), Pius 10th stood on the sidelines as Germany and Austria-Hungary set about dismantling the rest of the Continent.

The urban French audiences of 1928, and indeed, the audiences in much of Northern Europe understood the "message" here, depending upon their point of view: Kill the threatening energy of French democracy and give us another "man on a horse" (and good churchman), in this case a war hero named Philippe Petain... the very same Marshal Petain who would head the puppet Vichy government for the Nazis just a dozen years later.

Considering the subject matter, it's no surprise that a few reviewers =do= see that LoA is probably the most significant motion picture of the 20th century. Lean's epic is, after all, nothing less than the first of several vital chapters leading to present-day Kuwait, Iraq, Afghanistan and Iran. The dialog offers =all= the clues. Listen carefully.

The white man sees only his white enemy (here, it's the Germans; two generations later it would be the Russians) and Yergin's "Prize." The white man arms, trains and unifies the disparate and dispirited tribes he shredded a millennium ago after three centuries of wars over real estate, trade and "spices."

Lean leaves petroleum and opium out of it here. But will whoever it is who makes "Rumsfeld of Afghanistan" (or =whatever=) do likewise?

I've no idea if Lean or Spiegel understood the gravity of the tale. And it appears that most of it's hundreds of millions of viewers didn't get it, either.

Pity. Perhaps if they had, certain parties might have thought again about enlisting a world with a very long memory to fight their battles for them.

KWAW may be stuck in the ill-paced cage of a '60s TV melodrama, but the source material from pulp author Wade Miller is downright Diana Russell, Ellen Bass, Laura Davis, Andrew Vachss and Judith Lewis Herman in 1985. Which is to say, sexually abused hottie teener goes manipulative, man-hating borderline barracuda.

"Borderline" is the operative word here, yet it was almost unknown back in '64. And it wasn't until the dawn of the feminist movement in psychotherapy in the late '70s or so that =anybody= much connected the sort of character Ann's playing here to serial incest and/or molestation.

At the time, in fact, most of the so-called "authorities" on juvenile delinquency thought runaway girls were just "evil." That most of them =were= what Jody claims to be was rarely given much credence in the '60s. And it was well into the '80s before most psychotherapists understood that "borderline personality disorder" was the expectable result.

Miller has it down. Borderlines =are= little girls in adult bodies who fear... and rage... and need... and hate... and seduce... and abuse. And flip back and forth just as quickly as their emotional state of the moment demands. "Jody" may seem to be a little "cardboard" in her duplicity here, but hysteric borderlines often are. (Miller's "Jody" seems to be built on the most significant traits of the borderline personality described in the first Diagnostic and Statistical Manual back in 1952.)

Too bad the film wasn't directed by Stanley Kubrick who did a better job with a better book about the same topic two years earlier. That one was called "Lolita."