Lost in Lautrec: why Jose Ferrer was the best Toulouse

I watched the movie long before I knew very much about the man. But as with that other painter-of-the-people, Van Gogh, Lautrec's artworks are - what? Just around, everywhere. It's fashionable to hate the Hollywood versions of great artists (Lust for Life, which I really love, is universally loathed among art snobs), but to tell you the truth, I think Ferrer comes closer to  becoming Lautrec than any other actor could, or should even try to.

I wonder what that's like. I did a lot of acting in years past, community theatre, nothing nearly as intense as this, but I do know something about the process of becoming someone else. When you look at his face, it's startling, even shocking how much he resembles the real Henri. It isn't just the black eyebrows and heavy beard, or the familiar hat and cane. His features are close enough that he carried it off in a way which, now that I look at it again, seems uncanny. 

I didn't know much about Ferrer when I first saw the movie (and I was likely about ten years old then). In the many subsequent viewings at various ages, of course, the guy kept changing, and at some point I realized Ferrer has the sexiest, most voluptuously masculine voice in history. When Elizabeth Taylor first met Richard Burton, she told a friend, "His voice gives me orgasms." I feel the same way about Jose.

Yes, he was very good-looking, but somewhat heavy-featured, with a large nose and prominent lips. A Puerto Rican, he was no doubt considered "exotic" and did not play too many romantic leads. Though it could be argued Lautrec was the most romantic role of all.

I love this poster! It's yet another example of something you're supposed to hate. But hey, what about Henri himself? He could be called the very first multi-media  artist, producing not just brilliant drawings and oil pantings, but pastels, lithographs, book covers, calendars, and other forms of mass-production which appalled the purists, and quickly made him insanely famous. Quite literally, his posters were plastered all over Paris, and became so desirable that people literally tagged along as the new posters were put up so they could peel them off the walls before the glue was set.  As one of his biographers stated, "Everything was for sale,"  a poignant statement that reveals all the ways in which he sold his own soul.

So how can anyone say he didn't capture the real Henri, the broken-hearted bon vivant? It's  tempting to put these photos side-by-side with photos of the real Henri, but I don't think I even need to. The wounded look is there, the tristesse. 

In  this one, the resemblance is even more startling, because Ferrer somehow or other captures the most elusive thing about his photos: that sense that his public face is essentially unreadable. He must have studied pictures of him to get that distanced look, with all the fathomless hurt lurking behind it.

And at work. My God, the more I look at these, having spent most of the day looking at actual photos of Lautrec, the more amazed I am. So never mind that they used trick photography to make him look

like a dwarf, or had him walking along with his shoes on his knees.

Kirk Douglas claimed that playing Van Gogh cost him dearly, and it took a very long time to shake off the torture and torment of the man (if he ever did). I don't know if Ferrer immersed himself in the same way. So now I guess I have to find some biographical material to see if I can find out. Stay tuned, there will be more. . . 

Toulouse, Toulouse! Why do I feel that I know you?

OK  then, this is NOT going to be an essay.

This is NOT going to be a biography (there are plenty of those).

This won't be a rehash of the Jose Ferrer movie (much as I love it).

So what will it be?

When you begin to creep and sneak into the darkly bright,  incandescent, alley-smelling world of Lautrec, you come away changed, if in fact you come away at all.

Unknowable, yet, in a sense, too known. Known for his sneaking and creeping nocturnal habits, as much for his famous header down the stairs when he was a child (note: it didn't happen) and his aristocratic inbreeding as for his astonishing genius, the way masterpieces flew out of his tiny warped body, his fiery mind. 

I won't write about all the details of his life, as it was pretty short anyway (oops, Freudian slip! But it's one I think he would enjoy.) He made a kind of spectacle of himself, created a public persona, the inevitable cane, bowler hat and natty suit coat sitting so neatly above the stumpy atrocity of his legs.

I say atrocity, only because of what it did to him to be so disabled, and as a result, no doubt in constant pain. Is it any wonder he frequented those steamy night spots, drowning his diminutive self in gall and bitter wormwood?

(Absinthe-minded, he was, and it finished him off, but oh what glory came before!)

The tumble down the stairs didn't happen, except in the movie, but inbreeding did. It was the embarrassing family secret, first cousins marrying  first cousins in a long line of bleeding aristocrats, coming to a screeching dead end with Henri, his legs crumbling away under him, his facial features almost as distorted as King Charles II of Spain, the inbreeding train wreck of all time.

Long before I became so fascinated, when all I really knew about him was watching Jose Ferrer in Moulin Rouge (and by the  way, I think he captured Lautrec as well as, or better than, any actor could or should), I had this exact poster on my wall in Alberta. It didn't survive the move, for some reason, though I easily could have rolled it up and stashed it somewhere.

But I was fascinated by the way the background is  flipped over into the foreground.  The  subject of the poster, a garish, rather crude dancer named La Goulou ("the Glutton"), is somewhere in the middle, and in the background we see only black silhouettes of a lot of men and women in hats.

No  doubt, these are the delicate classes, slumming, hungry for entertainment that  would break every taboo  they had ever known. 

By placing the weirdly twisted, tree-looking brown man in the very front, it is as if we are in the audience, having  to try to look  past this ungainly  figure to get a good look at La Goulue and the way she kicked so high, you could see that she wasn't wearing any underpants.

This brown man appears in the movie, of course, and everyone complains his prosthetic nose and chin look fake. . . but maybe not.

And ah! In THIS one, not only is the dancer relgated to a smallish figure in the middle, the well-to-do hoity-toities in ther top hats and frilly, furry gowns aren't even looking at her, but justwalking by, promenading, apparently bored. They have come not  to see, but to be seen. 

Ah, Toulouse, Toulouse. Such a little man. He did  cultivate this dapper persona, this  half-man  who was actually taller sitting down than standing up. I always thought Lautrec was adorable, a sort of doll-man or  a puppet, though no  doubt he was forced to wear his disability like a badge. Though this seems not to have cramped his style socially or sexually (or, goodness knows, artistically), nevertheless, behind his back, his so-called friends muttered to each other about his shocking appearance.

Not just his body, but his face, which was universally described as coarse and even ugly.

And, of ourse, I am developing  a theory about this even as I sit here winging it. Yes, he had a rather large nose and very full lips, which he may have  tried to downplay with the shaggy moustache. But the nasty remarks about his huge nose and blubbery  lips came directly out of the snobbishness that decreed an "aristocrat" had to look like an aristocrat. What DOES that term mean, facially speaking? A thin, rather aquiline nose, cupid's bow lips, snooty fake-as-fuck eyes that were often half-closed from boredom. Aristocratic, eh what? And Lautrec was none of the above.

I  also believe, just  as I am sitting here figuring it out, that a large part of it was in fact a kind of racism. His ungainly nose and fat lips, in connection with his black-haired shagginess, made the snooty ones  think of Africa, and that was just not the thing, not at all, not at all. In fact, they'd see it as horrifying.

Jose Ferrer compares himself to a  monkey in the movie, explaining that beautiful women sometimes kept apes as pets, as they somehow enhanced their own beauty through contrast. No, he didn't  look like an ape, an African, or anyone else (well, maybe a bit  like King Charles II of Spain! But he couldn't help it if his family rolled around with their cousins.)

His facial features, along with the stunted bandy legs, made him look sort of exotic. And those eyes, which even his detractors had to admit were beautiful, exposed his soul: gentle, compassionate, even tender. It rarely showed in most of his photos, in which his face is oddly unreadable. But he was photographed a lot, and actually liked being photographed, though often in outlandish  costumes which meant, in modern parlance, "leaning in" to  his strange appearance, making it his "shtick". 

He'd make fun of himself, cut ahead of the line, and get the jabs in before anyone else could take a stab. 

He could capture the hoity-toitiness of the  self-appointed upper crust,  but he also exposed the relative emptiness of the well-to-do who flocked to the midnight cabarets for a nice evening of drunken slumming. Their finery  did not detract from the hardness of their faces. They could strut around and promenade, and try to outrun being found out - but they could not hide from that little man in the corner, furiously scribbling an image onto a napkin.

And gentlemen, yes, gentlemen, most of them already afflicted with syphilis, looking for a pickup. Why not this one? We can't see her face, but she is pulling back from him noticeably, perhaps appalled by his attentions. And who or what on earth is that apparition between them? A mask, a caricature, or some sort of  demon summoned from the depths of the gutter?

This is Jane Avril, played in the movie by Zsa Zsa Gabor, an unlikely choice, though she is the one who sings that divine song. Avril was a real professional and could kick so high her boots touched the  ceiling. But she too was all artifice, her own creation, a public persona, and here we see her leaving the threatre, in an unguarded moment looking very alone, and not particularly glamourous.

And yes, Toulouse spent a lot of time in brothels, not just partaking (and one of his nicknames among the girls was Little Coffee Pot), but sketching, and somehow honoring the most stigmatized members of society. Lautrec's working women often looked weary, and he caught  them without their come-hither masks on. But he also saw real tenderness between them. The erotic closeness between sex workers gave the women the only real love they would likely  ever know. 

And this is the real underside, the women lining up for the obligatory medical examination. Not  that it did  much of anything to halt the spread of venereal disease, but in order to keep their licenses, the madams had to put  their staff through this humiliation. And you can see how they feel about it in their faces. 

How is it that Lautrec can paint movement like no other painter who ever lived? For you not only hear the swish-swish of the dancer's livid pink petticoats - you  feel the breeze, even among the smoke and the fug  of the cabaret. 

These were the superstars of the fin de siecle - Aristide Bruant with his darkly comic, rather obscene songs written in a kind of crude Parisian patois, Jane Avril getting her kicks (and what could  be more phallic than the neck of that huge bull fiddle in the foreground? The musician looks like a maniac or a devil, or perhaps a gargoyle.)

Lautrec liked the crudeness of it, he cultivated it, he sang and praised it, and most of all, he painted it. All of it. His gaze was fierce, and candid, and even compassionate. He saw everything, and got it all down. He sported drag and clown suits and every other disguise that would protect his excruciatingly sensitive interior. It didn't quite work, but disguises never do.

This is the saddest clown I've ever seen. Or is he drunk? For, most of the time, he was, and it killed him, along with the ravages of untreatable syphilis and the raging genetic disaster inflicted by his ancestors, who thought  they were such hot  shit.

Ah, but here. He's taking in the lavish beauty of this luscious nude model,  appreciating it, just thinking  about how he is going to capture her body on the canvas, or on one of those great, gaudy, flaming posters that still have the power to jump  off the wall and nearly assault you. 

Like this one! MOULIN ROUGE! MOULIN  ROUGE! MOULIN ROUGE FOREVER! 

It is as if Lautrec is the cheering section for a  whole era, this so-called Belle Epoque which, as he realized only too well, wasn't too damned belle at all.

There are so many Lautrecs, and that is just the troble. When we think we know what he is trying to do, he pulls this one on us. This woman, heartbreakingly young, her white blouse falling open, having just serviced another customer or contemplating another hard, humiliating  day, looks soft and girlish, frighteningly vulnerable. He has, as always caught her in an unguarded moment.

But since life is a cabaret, old chum, the show must  go on, and it did, until it didn't. The circus poster featuring the bare horse's ass is somehow, against the odds, beautiful. We sense hoofbeats on sawdust, smell the scatty circus odor of the animals, even get a whiff of the bareback rider's garish perfume. While the man with the whip contemplates, just perhaps, bedding  her down at the end of the show.

(Please note. I didn't edit this, and I realize now that some of the paintings and posters appear more than once. It's like that Waldemar guy (who  hated the movie, for some reason) asking us to take another look. Or I wasn't in the mood to take the duplicates out, whatever. Toulouse often formally displayed various forms of his masterpieces, even showing preliminary sketches and the same images done in various different mediums. I'm just  glad I was able to write this, on a day when I was in more physical pain than I can ever remember. Bonjour, Toulouse, and goodbye.)

 

Space Cats — Magic Fly

Cat palate cleanser.  Spit out those dirty memories!

And this one, even better!

Horror show: what it's really like to be sick

 

I’ve been reluctant to write in any detail about the medical “issues” I have endured over the past 6 months or so (actually, it goes back to November – so it’s more like 8 months). I swear I didn’t realize something was seriously wrong until a week or so after Halloween, when I suddenly felt an agonizing pain in my lower abdomen on the right side. From everything I have ever heard about appendicitis, I assumed that was what it was, so I  finally caved and went in to Emergency, knowing it would be an almost-worse ordeal.

And it was. THREE HOURS LATER, after sitting there twisting and writhing in agony (hey, I could have done that at home!), the hospital staff finally got around to me – took some blood, poked around, then suddenly wanted to do a CT scan. This surprised me, as you usually have to wait months for one. 

Then suddenly, things changed.

A nurse came up to me with a very serious look on her face, and in a very serious voice said, “Margaret, you have an infection.” Infection? Of what kind, and how? I’d never heard of an infection brewing in an otherwise healthy bowel.

But no, my bowel wasn’t healthy at all, or at least it didn’t look good on the scan. They let me have a copy of the report, and they shouldn’t have. It was mostly technical gobbledygook, but I did see one word that jumped out at me in 3D: MALIGNANCY.

What it said was, “underlying malignancy must be ruled out”. Ruled out?

They kept me overnight, another shock, and then I was fast-tracked for all sorts of things. Almost right away, I saw a gastroenterologist, then had  an “emergency colonoscopy”, which was messy, agonizing and frightening (nothing like the previous ones I'd had). I seemed to be bleeding from somewhere deep inside. Then, on Christmas Day (Christmas Day?), I got a phone call giving me a date for another CT scan. The scan took place on New Years’ Eve. Needless to say, the festive season wasn’t very festive, and I remember feeling rotten on Christmas Day and trying to act normal, so as not to bring the whole family down. 

Then came the surgery. Jesus God, the surgery! I can’t or won’t go into all the details, because half the time I didn’t even know what was going on or what was happening to me. This upset my kids, who seemed to think I was deliberately withholding information from them. But I was on so  many painkillers that I was barely coherent. They had apparently removed about a quarter of my colon and reconfigured my entire gut, but fortunately, since it was done laparoscopically, all I had were two little incisions held together with surgical glue. 

Quite  literally, I was glued together.

The surgeon initially told me I’d  be in the hospital 2 to 5 days. Instead it was nearly 2 weeks. I had no bowel control. The pain meds didn’t work. I couldn’t eat or sleep. I threw up constantly, even if I hadn't eaten anything at all. I had to use a walker just to get to the bathroom, and I usually didn't make it in time.

It was a hospital stay, in other words, but going home was worse in some ways. I had to camp downstairs on the pullout bed – couldn't do stairs, could not even get to the bathroom under my own steam. Having to use a walker made me believe I was now officially in Old Ladyhood. Or was it worse than that?

Since then it’s been one test, one specialist, one procedure after another. I thought I’d be out of the woods by now, but no. The surgeon revealed that had they not removed the diseased tissue, it almost certainly would have turned cancerous (that “underlying malignancy”) within  a year. I really didn’t feel much better, and had it not been for uplifting visits from my grandchildren (bearing flowers, handmade cards and even Purdy’s chocolates), I don’t know how I would have gotten through it. Like angels, they descended on the house with cheery messages, sitting on the pullout bed and gossiping and just being kids. I wanted to join them, as they were clearly in  the land of the living.

But much of the time I felt suicidal, I really did, and my poor 80-year-old husband had to wait on me hand and foot, which with his own mobility problems he could barely manage. I wasn’t cheerful. I kept saying unacceptable things like, “I think I’m going to DIE!” This went on for weeks and weeks. At a followup appointment, the surgeon told me that full recovery might take six months to a year.

Since then, this has actually come to be good news, giving me more time to feel rotten without worrying that I might never recover.

There were so many low points and bizarre happenings. “They” found a spot on my lung during a supposedly routine x-ray, which made me wonder if I had somehow become tubercular. They did more blood tests, and kept finding more and more things wrong.

The spot on my lung was just the beginning. My kidneys were out of whack, there was something wrong with my thyroid gland, and I had to see a hematologist (blood  doctor? Much as I love Dracula, this was not good news.) I had an ultrasound, both kidneys and thyroid, leaving me bruised and worried. I had to wonder: am I really that messed up, or is all this being done out of an abundance of caution (or because I’m 71)?

Bits of traumatic memory from the hospital keep repeating in my head, and in my dreams: being rushed down a dark hallway on a gurney; being told I needed an emergency blood transfusion (!); having a nurse lean over me and saying, “Let’s hope this is the turning point.” Having a disgusting nasal tube shoved down into my stomach for days on end, so my intestines could have a "nice rest".Then another medical person came in and talked to me about my lung, but it made no sense to me at all. My LUNG?

But the worst of the worst of the worst was when they showed me how to use a colostomy bag. Yes. It got that bad.

I have never had serious  surgery in my life, and am wondering, if I need to go through all this again, if it might be better if I just died. I have slowly gotten more  and more of myself back, but since I already had severe arthritis in my spine and hip (on the right side, of course, where the surgery took place), osteoporosis, and – worst of all – sciatica, I'm still not exactly comfortable in my own skin. And lying flat on my back for weeks on end put pressure on the worst possible place, thus activating these various sources of agony as never before.

So where am I now? I wasn’t going to “share” much of this, as nothing is more tiresome than an old person going on and on about their surgical nightmares. But for God’s sake, why do I have this ability to write so well (and hey, if I didn’t think I wrote well, why would I have devoted my life to it?) – is it just  for entertainment, or is it there to save my life in a while ‘nother way?

So this is a more detailed account, which I do not think anyone will be interested in reading anyway. Why do I bother? I”ve been carrying all this around for eight months, and trying to minimize the ordeal for the sake of my worried family. I’m no longer screaming at my poor  husband, and he’s no longer having to carry trays of food to me or help me out of bed so I can use the walker. I no longer need to wear Depends so I won’t crap all over myself. But how am I spiritually? Emotionally?

Changed, changed utterly, as Yeats used to say. I don’t know where I am, these days, as suddenly everything is "different". I lost ten pounds during this whole ordeal, and – realizing if I got sick again my weight might plummet dangerously – I set myself the task of gaining it back. THAT was another weird thing in itself. All my life I have fought my weight, thinking I was obese at 130 pounds (and brainwashed by a culture that was pre-body-positivity and horribly obsessed with being thin). I had to force myself to eat, because nausea was one of the most  debilitating things I was facing. And I had to flip everything over, and everything I had tried to do for my entire life had to be reversed so that I could GAIN weight. No, HAVE the candy! HAVE the chips! Whatever would make me fatter. (As my idol Weird Al would say: "Eat it! Just eat it!")

It was Bizarro-land, in so  many ways, a chronically-well person having to live in the Land of the Sick. Though I appear to have dodged the cancer bullet, there are no guarantees, given how my kidneys, thyroid and blood seem to still be out of whack. And if cancer WAS brewing in my colon, it could recur, and this  time I really WOULD need the colostomy bag. Why else would they have shown me how to use it?

I don’t want to edit this or add clever pictures or whatever I usually do. I probably shouldn’t post it at all, but I am beginning to see why old people talk about their medical ordeals. They’re lonely, and they’re scared, and they wonder what sort of macabre death scene they may be heading towards.

One of the worst things about getting old, for me, has been watching as my most cherished loved ones are taken from me, one by one. FOUR close friends died in the space of two years: cancer, stroke, suicide. My sister-in-law, always in the full bloom of health, died horribly of cancer and was down to 80 pounds at the end. I will never see these people again, and I can’t just run out and “make new friends”. It was hard enough feeding and nurturing these relationships over decades, but trying to start all over again seems impossible.

What keeps me going now is my spirituality, but it is nothing like what I experienced before. My "god" is the life force itself, manifested by nature in all its multifaceted glory, particularly in the form of birds. Not just the backyard variety, but in tiny ducklings peeping and cheeping, Canada geese hissing at me, and a glorious blue heron, its enormous wingspan owning the sky. All of which I saw just this afternoon. By the way, Sky Daddy, as he is sometimes called, is no longer my guiding force, and any thought of attending a church makes me shudder. I’ll be there soon enough at my memorial service.

And, by the way, as I lay flat on my back on the pullout bed, I planned my memorial down to the location (the dock at Burnaby Lake, where the birds are at their most sublime) and the songs I wanted (three of Bob Dylan's spirituals: Death is  Not the End, Every Grain of Sand, and I’ve Made up my Mind to Give Myself to You). At one point, half in a fever dream, I became convinced no one cared about me, nor had anyone ever cared about me in any meaningful way at all. This anguish just came up out of nowhere and overwhelmed me. And at  one point I wrote  a suicide note before tearing it up, not wanting to upset the family.

I wish I could  share better news, and today went OK, so if today goes OK, I have to be content with that.  And that’s about it, that’s the report to date. I can coast a bit  now, until I have more surgery (thyroid biopsy) in October. Then the hemotologist, no doubt wrapped in a Dracula cape like Bela Lugosi.

Can I breathe now? I’d better keep  going, and not look  back – because something might be gaining on me.

(The photo is a shot of  me at eight years old, on vacation at Bondi resort in Muskoka, with a baby kingbird perched on my finger. I have no idea how I got a wild bird to stay on my hand! This image was the cover photo for my second novel, Mallory.)

Mushmouthed English: Why does everyone sound like Sean Connery now?

 

Why can’t anyone talk anymore? Am I being such a grammatical fussbudget? Not if I hear the language twisted into a corkscrew every day. First it was vocal fry, which is about as pleasant to listen to as fingernails on a blackboard (and WHY did young women suddenly decide to croaaaaak at the end of each sentence? Is there a club?) The total mangling of the word “lay” is another one: “He was just laying there.” This has become so standardized that if you say “lying”, people will “correct” you (and how I hate being corrected to the wrong one!). Now I’m hearing something new: a “str” sound comes out “SHTR”. This mushmouthed version crops up everywhere now, so that people sound like Sean Connery: shtrait, shtrong, shtart, shtrain, shtrive, and on and on. It has become standardized from sheer useage. These things sooner or later worm their way into the dictionary as “correct".

I hear this mostly in the young, of course, and mostly online, but it's also cropping up on TV talk shows - and, sooner or later, news anchors, weather people, etc. etc. (teachers?) will begin to use it as standard due to sheer familiarity - hearing it and, I guess, unconsciously mimicking it. Or not? It's like a disease, to my ears. And, of course, once you notice it, you  seem to hear it everywhere.

So how can the English language be warped and twisted that way? I once heard a recording of "old English", and it sounded more Germanic than anything else. Middle English is still pretty squashy. I studied Chaucer once in a literature course, and though I needed Coles notes to translate it for me, our prof was proficient at reciting the Canterbury Tales, the syllables rolling out of him as majestically as a hammy Shakespearean actor.

Not only that. Shakespearean English wasn't like standard English at all. It was more like "pirate talk", full of errs and arrs. Not sure how they found that out, unless someone time-travelled with a recording device.

But I'm still miffed. English developed very slowly over centuries, but this stuff has happened seemingly overnight. The internet is a great source of contagion, whether conscious or otherwise, so the whole process is enormously sped up.

Or something. But I'm shtarting to feel very shtrongly about it. And to be shtrictly annoyed. 

Today, all I want to do is watch 7 hours of drive-in intermission shorts!

Oh yes! Escapism at its finest. Given my medical status (THREE appointments with specialists in the next few months, not to mention multiple lab visits - can't I just leave them a pint of my blood and be done with it??), I need a distraction, and these jerky old things work perfectly. Surrealism at its finest! I never went to too many drive-in movies, and now they're pretty much obsolete (though there was talk of reviving them during the pandemic). You could eat, talk, and (best of all) smoke in the comfort of your own car, with the dog slobbering all over you, the baby crying, the kids whining for snacks, etc. etc. The movie was the least of it.

I see a lot of nostalgia in the YouTube comments sections, as if the '80s and '90s were a kind of paradise (though everyone griped about it back then, and were nostalgic for the '50s and '60s). It's a kind of yearning for a simpler time, which of course it wasn't. Just different. But I never go to ANY movies now, as all I see is the 55th iteration of Superman (GOD not again!) and other stupid, soulless, mass-produced superhero and gaming movies. I used to go to a movie a week back in the '90s, and I'd say 80% of them were watchable, and even if they weren't, I'd get an extra-large popcorn with extra "golden topping", and just stuff my face. Such bliss! 

BETRAYED: A Story of Religious Abuse

This little clip from YouTube claims to be a story of fraud, betrayal and abuse of power. And ironically, it turned out that way after all. 

This trailer for a movie called BELONG is all that exists of that particular feature film. The pastor seen in this clip is one Modise Molefe, the minister of my former church in 2002. Though a new ministry was seen as a marvelous fresh start (and look, we hired a black minister!), it was only many months later we discovered he had been "dismissed" from his former ministry by the larger body of the church. No details were released in order to protect the privacy of the ex-clergy, and it worked. 

Within a couple of months of starting his ministry, things went alarmingly south. It wasn't just his questionable financial dealings, it was the way he shouted at committee members, somehow set them against each other so nothing could happen, and railed at us about our spiritual deficiencies on Sunday morning. Then there was that little matter of the young woman he took advantage of, claiming he was going to leave his wife and kids and start a great new ministry with her. (None of it happened, thank the Lord.)

The result of not knowing anything about his past is that we felt alone with the chaos, and (as he kept telling us) somehow responsible for it. We had to try to chop our way through the incredible wilderness of fraud, damage and shattered trust he had created in a stable, longstanding congregation in just a few months.
When the whole thing finally blew up and the larger body of the church investigated and then "dismissed" him (sound familiar?), the congregation floundered badly after that, and never did recover. 

His "movie" came years later, and I remember he hyped it very hard, making an announcement stating that it was to be shown at the Sundance Film Festival (except for one little detail: it didn't exist!) .
He made several trailers for it, with different titles according to what he saw as trendy at the time. As you can see from the clip, he had a ready explanation for the disaster of his ministry: his African culture had been cruelly rejected by a bunch of comfortable, well-off white people! We did, for the most part, fit that last description, but what dismays me even more is the fact that what happened to us is hardly rare. It's just that no one talks about it, seemingly embarrassed about the fact that they had been "taken". Or, are they protecting certain people, and not others?

But this sort of spiritual abuse is so common now that I seem to see it every day: religious corruption in one form or another. And it is particularly bruising when it happens, not on the stage of a massive megachurch, but within the walls of a very small church which was looking forward to a fresh start in their ministry, and instead were permanently disabled and never found their way back.

Bless him! Damn him! It's Elmer Gantry

Though this started off paranthetical, I want to devote a whole post to yet another movie I re-watched for the first time in at least 30 years - Burt Lancaster's brilliant tour-de-force as a creepy, fake evangelist in Elmer Gantry. Not only did this movie exceed all my extremely high expectations, but I think I had goosebumps for a solid two hours, not just because of the electrifyingly charismatic (and sexy) main character but because every single performance in this thing was so note-perfect, with NOT ONE miscast actor even in the smallest role. Even the characters with no speaking parts were anything but furniture - they all knew what they were supposed to be doing as part of the scene. The directing was tight and dynamic, the music as fierce and compelling as Lancaster himself, and the script - let's just say it all worked.

It worked for me personally because since the last time I saw it in the '90s, I lived through a horrible church scandal in which the congregation completely fell for a charismatic fake who basically destroyed the foundations of the church in a single year. And he wasn't even sexy like Burt! But it was more than that. Gantry was not just a shallow creep. Lancaster knew how to act using his eyes, his hands and face and voice, and at times he expressed a real tenderness towards Sister Sharon and even the prostitute who tried to frame him. Gantry had levels. He had wanted to be a minister of the Gospel himself, and failed due to his inability to live within the rules. So was it really coincidence that drew him back to the revival tent? Why did he fall so hard for Sister Sharon, literally at first sight? In some part of himself, did he think he could start all over again, and this time get it right? There was more than a trace of conscience in Gantry, and even though he was practiced in ignoring it, we could see it peeping through. How the hell did he manage that?

His internal conflicts, no matter how submerged, were somehow communicated. If this seething moral unease hasn't been settled in Gantry's mind, how can we make up our own minds about him? We can't, and that is what makes his character so compelling. We can't hate him. Sometimes we're rooting for him, as when he slides down the church aisle as if stealing third base. In the first 15 minutes, he makes Jean Simmons laugh in a slightly shocking way - raucous, unihibited, followed by the incredible line, "You smell like a real man." So there is a subtext of sexual attraction between them from the get-go. Wasn't this just a little bit provocative for those times?

Adding an even darker subtext is Sister's later confession to Gantry that her Sharon Falconer persona is a complete invention, and that her real name is "Katy Jones from Shantytown". But was this a real confession, or a strange kind of identification, one fraud acknowledging another? She does clarify that she is different from Gantry in that "I believe. I really believe!" But there are moments in Lancaster's flat-out-brilliant portrayal when we see the shreds and tatters of his former faith, somehow communicated in the way only a genius actor can. The theme of religious spectacle is being held up for scrutiny here, and the audience is left to decide for  themselves how sincere any of it is.

There's stuff going on here, so layered, so levelled and striated, that we can't possibly take it all in. I could watch it ten more times and still have goose bumps. Gantry was made in 1960, and received all the accolades it could possibly receive, including an Oscar for Lancaster, who claimed that Gantry was really just a version of himself. That does NOT mean it was an easy role to play - playing yourself can be excruciating, as Marlon Brando was to discover when he publicly gutted himself in Last Tango in Paris. He needed to go into therapy to recover.



True, they don't make them like that any more, and I am not the only one who feels this way. Can I name even one actor who comes close to Simmons or Lancaster, not to mention poor old Monty Clift? Even 30 years ago, real acting genius was disappearing, replaced by the cult of personality. The problem is, you can't smell an actor any more, because no one has the chops. Which is why I have pretty much stopped going to the movies, and why I keep on tuning in to Turner Classics to see pictures which SURELY won't be as superb as I remember. Or not? In this case, Elmer Gantry was like the scene at the very beginning, in which Sister Sharon sees a shooting star - blazing and all too fleeting, but burned into your eyelids through sheer incandescence.

When a good movie turns bad: how many times is this going to happen?

Having come out the other side of The Roosevelts and Taxi  Driver, I'm finding most of my movie nostalgia trips are disappointing. I finally got around to watching Martin Scorsese's The Age of Innocence (triggered by my re-post of the poetic tribute to my good pal Marty). I remember seeing it in the mid-90s, back when I used to go to a movie a week, often commuting into Vancouver if I thought it was worthwhile. And I do rememver loving it, or at least finding it intriguing. It's based on an Edith Wharton novel which is, in essence, about social snobbery and intrigue in 1870s New York. Daniel Day Lewis was in his heyday then, and apparently could do no wrong, for he played a frustrated lover who could not connect sexually with the free-spirited Michelle Pfeiffer because he was already married to an appropriately dull blueblood (Winona Ryder).

It's a period piece, of course, but it's all very  '90s, and even though it was meant to represent deepest antiquity, it just felt dated. For one thing, Day Lewis was probably way more boring than Winona, who actually came across as the most subtle, best-realized character. Michelle Pfeiffer was so unappealing, not just physically unattractive but abrasive and particularly un-charming and un-seductive, that the whole thing just didn't come off, any more than her tight Victorian corset and elbow-length gloves were going to come off.

I hate to have to say it, but I'll say it - Day Lewis came across as so passive and repressed that he bored me to tears. You can overdo the repressed thing to the point of coma. He even seemed effeminate to  me, a word we aren't supposed to use any more - but what I mean is, there was absolutely zero sexual spark between the  two of them. Nothing. Pfeiffer seemed cold and superficial, her flirting seemed like an actual effort (I got so sick of her thrusting her hand out at men so they were forced to kiss it), and if Day Lewis would JUST get that moony-calf look off his face. . . Was there any sexual tension there at all? Did there need to be? 

Well, yes. It's called acting. In some cases, the spark is already there and only needs to be revealed: Bogart and Bacall are a notable example, as are Bette Davis and Gary Merrill in All About Eve. You got the feeling they couldn't wait to hear "CUT!" so they could jump into bed together. But these are actors, folks. Their stock in trade is pretending. So how could this all fall so flat?

Part of it was just the wild popularity of these actors at the time, which must have had a huge effect on casting. Well, we COULD get this-or-that actor or actress, but  Michelle Pfeiffer just had a huge hit with (insert title of hit), and wouldn't she be a bigger draw? And as I study the  so-called Golden Age of movies more closely, I realize how dicey casting can be,with a dozen actors turning down a role, maybe because their agents warned them against it (or they wouldn't be paid enough), or a thousand other actors auditioned for the role and were rejected. So exactly who gets the  gig?

You  weren't supposed to criticize Day Lewis back then, because he wasn't just an actor. He was an ECK-TORRRR. He was kind of like Montgomery Clift, in that even with Liz Taylor he had to fake sexual arousal. He was best buds with Liz, and it showed in the lack of passion in their scenes in A Place in the Sun and Raintree County. It just wasn't there. 

Do we hear of Day Lewis now? Was his middle name really "Day", or was that just an affectation to save him the embarrassment of  being plain old Daniel Lewis? Who'd remember THAT? And how dull would it look on the marquee?

It would be interesting to actually sit down with my favorite movie Mafioso and get Marty's honest take on what Lewis (LEWIS) was actually like to work with. He'd likely praise him to the skies, because that's what you were supposed to do back then.There were certain movie icons that weren't to be criticized. Meryl Streep was an untouchable goddess back then, no matter how pretentious, mannered and even ludicrous her portrayals were. This was brought home to me recently by her narration of Eleanor Roosevelt's voice in the PBS series I just re-watched. It was just  a caricature, a cartoonish take on the somewhat William Shatner-esque halting quality of her speech. Unfortunately, there were a lot of voice clips of the real Eleanor in the last episode, and it became obvious that the halting quality only showed up  very late in her life, as it often does in older people (excuse. . . me. . . yes. . . ). But she sounded like a querulous old lady when she was supposed to be 20 years old.

Why does bad acting get so richly rewarded, leading to such astonishing blunders in casting? I don't go to  movies any more because I am not interested in YET ANOTHER SUPERMAN MOVIE (or movies based on stupid video games or whatever other junk).  Sometimes I miss those long  commutes into Vancouver, mostly the anticipation of seeing something worth the trudge - but I have to tell you, quite  often the popcorn was the best part.

So why did I have such a different opinion of this movie 30-some years ago? It's the usual thing - I'm way different than when I was a mere child of 40. I've seen a lot, lived, loved, lost (etc. etc. - all the rest of it). But a lot of it comes down to the radical change in pop culture. It's almost unrecognizable now. Either Daniel Day Lewis (or Danny Lewis) has died and I don't realize it yet, or he has retired because he's too ugly like Jack Nicholson, or suffereng from dementia (and how  many actors seem to have dementia, these days?), or just got fed up with trying to pretend he was sexually attracted to cold, charisma-less actresses in parts for which they were woefully miscast.

So why did I watch Taxi Driver - again??

A little Italian let’s praise today:
The Topo Gigio of pictures, let’s say.

When Taxi Driver comes on TV,
I always drop what I’m doing, you see,
For Travis Bickle is my main man,
Because of DeNiro I’m such a great fan.

When first I saw this story bleak,
I had to through my fingers peek,
For though the end was a gory mess,
I couldn’t stop watching, I must confess.

Then I saw a picture of Marty,
Who supports the Italian Munchkin party.
Like my Uncle Aubrey his eyebrows were dense,
And his movies didn’t always make much sense.



But to the soul they spoke without fail,
For Raging Bull's a morality tale.
And fluids red from DeNiro’s face
Went gushing and flying all over the place.

When we saw Jake LaMotta bash his head,
It filled us all with horror and dread.
But for our director, comedy was king,
For sociopaths were Marty’s favorite thing.

I can’t tell you all the movies he did,
For I’d be here all day, I do not kid.
But some of them were a big surprise,
Like Age of Innocence, pure sex in disguise.

And "Alice" by Bursteyn, my what a trick,
For feminist views he laid on quite thick.
And when he did that movie of Jesus,
He went far out of his way to please us.

Then there was Goodfellas, my what a pic,
And I can’t say it was my favorite flick.
Every time I try to watch this thing,
It doesn’t exactly make me sing.

No, there’s pictures where human flesh does rip,
And he and DeNiro seem joined at the hip.
It’s an odd sort of duo, a big guy and small,
With both of them Cosa Nostra and all.

Real genius is rare, so let's praise this guy,
And hope that his pic on Sinatra will fly.
His turkeys are few, though with Liza Minnelli
He went on a coke binge and turned into jelly.



Martin Scorsese, Martin Scorsese,
Your pictures are great and drive film students crazy.
So some day I hope, in my brief mortal span
I can call you just Marty: cuz you is de man!

Blogger's post-mortem. YES, WHY? Why did I watch Taxi Driver again, when I was already sort of depressed and getting over surgery, etc. - ? Was it for the incredible Bernard Herrman score, so intense he literally died right after finishing it? Is it DeNiro's ability to make us feel at least a little bit sorry for Travis Bickle, the sociopath's sociopath?

No, this time it was different. As I was dragged into this dark underworld once again, I thought of a former friend, someone who seemed to have a sort of undercurrent in his personality. A quirk? Worse than that. He was obsessive. He had never been in the military, but constantly talked about guns and tales of military sacrifice and something he called "special forces". He spoke about  martial arts as if he was a master, but had never taken part. He loved Chuck Norris movies and wanted ME to love them, too. And he seemed to have been behind the barn door when the social awareness brain cells were passed out.

It came to a bad end, because he kept on trying to intrude in my life, even when I had decided he was just too creepy to stay friends with . (My other friends actually warned me about him, something like "he's not playing with a full deck" - cruel, but in a way, accurate). I don't know if he ever acted out, but neither did Travis until the bloody end, when he was hailed as a hero for blowing several people away in the most gory movie scene I've ever witnessed.

And yet, I keep watching it, knowing what is going to happen. Why?

I wasn't going to watch it, I REALLY wasn't, and then I watched it and felt heavy and bogged down, and I remembered my former friend, the one who eventually scared me with that sociopathic feeling, the sense something in him was just missing. He seemed to be ticking, almost audibly. The last contact I had with him, he became my Facebook friend (how did he find me?), and it started up again. He posted things "at" me, going on and on about how cruel I had been to him, how ungenerous, how mean I was. The posts were full of self-pity, and did not in my mind match up with what I knew of him back then. Finally, realizing he hadn't changed or had actually gotten worse, I blocked him, and he somehow found my email and ripped into me for my cruelty. Again.

As always when I watch this dark morality tale, what really triggered me and let loose these dark memories was the score. This is music like I have never heard music before. It seethes. It snarls. Snare drums escalate and escalate into the rat-tat-tat-tat-tat of a machine gun. Some of it is dark, murky. There are eerie harp glissandos, up and down, up and down, and it's like having sand thrown in your face. 

At the very end of Taxi Driver, having created one of the worst bloodbaths in film history, Travis is not only praised as a hero - he actually gets the girl. And yes, this did actually happen to my former friend - he got married, and last I heard he was still married, though still aimless and unemployed, and vaguely resentful about everyone and everything. His wife is more of a caregiver than a life partner. But how can we question people's needs? They are what they are.

You might ask, as I am asking myself right now, why was I ever friends with this guy in the first place. It's hard to believe, but he really did help me at a time when my life was in such a mess that I quite easily could have died. The echoes of Travis genuinely caring about Iris and wanting to rescue her registered this time as never before. And it's damn hard to see real altriusm in someone who scares you half to death, someone you just can't deal with any more. But the fact is, he needed me to stay needy. When I didn't need his support any more, he couldn't take it and tried to take me down with him.

So this silly little poem just popped into my memory again. It's sort of a detox from last night. And yes, it WAS the musical score that grabbed me the most. It is beyond disturbing, and the fact it is the last gasp of a brilliant composer makes it all the more unsettling.

Then my mind leaped and hopped into present day, when DeNiro gave a speech at the Cannes Film Festival criticizing a certain politician whom I am doing my best to ignore. Not always successfully. But someone had to  eome out and say it. He is destroying the arts, destroying the nation, and no one seems to even notice it, glued to their phones, assuming it's not their problem.

So can a sociopath really gain that much worldly power? Well, what do you think? And why was he actually welcomed back, after four harrowing years of running the nation into a ditch?