Theme Time: Barry Gray - Space 1999, RIP Martin Landau

Sad to hear that the great Martin Landau has died at the age of 89.

In tribute to the Hollywood veteran, here's Barry Gray's bombastic theme for Gerry Anderson's Space: 1999

Starring alongside his then wife Barbara Bain, Space: 1999 ran for two seasons from 1975 to 1977 and as John Koenig remains, certainly on this side of the pond, as one of Landau's most enduring starring roles. Only that of Rollin Hand in TV's Mission Impossible could match it. Landau was, along with Steve McQueen, the only applicants out of 500 to enter the acclaimed Actors Studio in 1955 where he was tutored by Lee Strasburg and Elia Kazan to name but a few and would go on to become an executive director with the Studio. His films include Hitchcock's North by Northwest, Cleopatra, The Greatest Story Ever Told, Nevada Smith alongside Actors Studio contemporary McQueen, Empire State, Francis Ford Coppola's Tucker: The Man and His Dream, for which he earned an Oscar nomination, Woody Allen's Crimes and Misdemeanours, which earned him a second nomination, and Tim Burton's Ed Wood which finally bagged him the Oscar. 

RIP

They Call Mister Tibbs! (1970)

"They call me MISTER Tibbs!"

So said Sidney Poitier's visiting detective in the face of a less than hospitable Southern welcome in 1967's classic In The Heat of the Night. Three years later, and Poitier returned to the character with this, the first of two sequels, which directly references that line of dialogue in its title. 

Unfortunately, you take the character of Virgil Tibbs out of In The Heat of the Night and you're left with not very much. The film attempts to open his character out more, by giving him a private and domestic family life of marriage and parenthood away from his work, but this only serves to mystify the viewer - if he was a married father of two infant children, a boy and a girl, why no mention of this during his previous case in Sparta, Mississippi? You'd think him being waylaid up there would lead to calls home, right? The sequel also goes some way to further muddy the waters by placing Tibbs in San Francisco rather than Philadelphia, which was previously established. When his superior points out he's been with them twelve years and he explains he's known the Martin Landau character, one of the suspects in the murder case he's assigned, all his life then you know this is one big continuity mess.

Giving him a family doesn't help the matter of his character either; in slapping his infant son across the face several times, encouraging him to "puff, puff" on a giant cigar he gives him to smoke and giving him hard liqueur to drink, it's safe to say that this Mr Tibbs won't be winning Father of the Year any time soon! Seriously this scene is quite staggering now, I'm not sure how it looked in 1970, but it looks bad now.

The title may proclaim They Call Me Mister Tibbs! but really Poitier's character here could have been A.N Other, and the film goes the way of many sequels, walking the well trod path to mediocrity. Poitier tries but unlike In The Heat of the Night he has no one really to bounce off - Martin Landau and Anthony Zerbe, with respect, are no Rod Steiger and Warren Oates. The murder mystery is a dull, limp affair that is well signposted from the off to the audience but seems to prove elusive to the cops on screen who wade through it like it were made of treacle. These great swathes of slow, poor procedural action are interspersed with Tibbs' domestic problems which feel like things The Cosby Show might have considered a decade later. Director Gordon Douglas has an annoying habit of placing his actors directly in front of the camera to deliver their lines to the viewer and he also has terrible issues with pacing, with only Quincy Jones' dated funk kicking in signifying to us that Something Is About To Happen. When it does, it occasionally lifts this from the routine, but it quickly slumps back into inertia not long after. 

Trivia: the opening murder scene is scored by Jones' reworking of his own Something's Cookin', which he had previously used in his soundtrack to The Italian Job just a year earlier. It kind of sums They Call Me Mister Tibbs! up actually, trading off past glories.

Empire State (1987)

Ron Peck and Mark Ayres took a total of five years to develop their project about the self serving aggression they had come to notice in the British character across the 1980s. That project was this film, Empire State - a neon lit nihilistic nightmare depiction of London, and a glitzy East End nightclub, across 24 hours. When it was broadcast by Channel 4 in October 1989 it was met with a barrage of complaints from viewers who felt that the end result was deeply offensive, singling out the  language and violence as being too excessive.

It's a deeply ambitious film from director Peck, and co-writer Ayres which seeks to address several then contemporary issues of London, including its Thatcherite excess, the desperation of the have-not's in society, the gay scene and the rent boy subculture, and the old East End gangland set. The intention seems to be to take the marker laid down by John MacKenzie in 1979's The Long Good Friday of the gangster genre in a sociopolitical context, and to develop it and see where it has now taken us some eight years into Thatcher's premiership. It's a stylised piece certainly, but despite the characters and stories being writ large, I feel that there's enough grain of truth within them to make it feel just as valid about the time it was made as the much praised Wall Street, which is now admittedly looking a bit rough around the edges.

The film boasts a fragmented plot structure, introducing us to several characters and their individual stories which ultimately converge only in the key final scenes set in the titular den of inequity that is the Empire State itself. Some of these stories are of course better and more involving than others, but perhaps the best statement on the changing tide which swept through the country at the time is the controversial Docklands development, which is shown to become the centrepiece of conflict between Frank (Ray McAnally) and Paul (Ian Sears). The former is a garrulous, ageing old-style East End gangster, whilst the latter is his former protege who has risen from his rent boy beginnings and has enough vision to attract important new money into the area from both the yuppies of West London and a rich investor from America. Veteran Hollywood star Martin Landau plays the American money, who we see enjoying it rough "but not too rough" with a quick talking cockney hustler  Johnny (Lee Drysdale) who dreams one day of making it in New York.  Meanwhile hanging on the fringes of the tale is Danny (Jamie Foreman) a hapless henpecked guy in over his head with Elizabeth Hickling's no good and greedy club hostess Cheryl. Unable to provide for their future together, he takes a very dangerous and bloody path indeed. 

Full of familiar faces who went on to bigger things (Foreman, Gary Webster, Ronan Vibert, Sadie Frost, Glen Murphy, Perry Fenwick and Lorcan Cranitch) and inexperienced actors who - perhaps rightly going on evidence here - did not (tragically Jason Hogenson who plays teenager Pete, down from Newcastle to search for his friend who worked at the club and is now presumed dead, is now in real life homeless after a string of custodial sentences and a diagnosis of schizophrenia) Empire State may be something of a flawed experiment but it's a great social document on Thatcherism and the 1980s and perhaps an overlooked example of LGBT British cinema from that period.

Anna Nicole (2013)

I realised with some sobering surprise at the weekend that the eighth anniversary of Playboy and Guess jeans model Anna Nicole Smith's death had occurred the previous week (see my blog post here)

Eight years already?

Being a teenager in the 1990s, Anna Nicole Smith will always have a special place in my heart. Back then it seemed like the battle of the boobs; you were either a Pamela Anderson fan or you were devoted to Anna Nicole. On the whole I fell into the latter category, preferring her old style Hollywood glamour that seemed to hark back to the likes of Jayne Mansfield and, her own idol of course, Marilyn Monroe.

In a way it was cruelly fitting that like those two voluptuous starlets, Anna Nicole's life was equally as doomed to ridicule, controversy, exploitation and ultimately great tragedy. 

There's a great story to be told of the life of Anna Nicole Smith, but unfortunately this Lifetime TV movie biopic, entitled simply Anna Nicole, isn't it. Mary Harron is an efficient director and she shows it on occasion here, but its staggering to see how she has gone from American Psycho to this cheap entertainment. Subject wise and thematically, this follows in the footsteps of her HBO movie The Notorious Bettie Page but doesn't deliver on that (admittedly only C+) film's level. The main problem is the unmistakable trappings of the made for TV biopic; there's some truly atrocious dialogue on offer from writers Joe Batteer and John Rice who insist on having character's drop lines like lead weights to signpost their role or intention ("Anna Nicole, you are every man's fantasy. I want you to be the face of Guess Jeans" says CEO Paul Marciano whilst in another scene Anna receives a phone call that starts with "This is your agent" just so we know why the man on the phone in the big office will go on to discuss her career!) Also, does every Lifetime movie tell its character's story with them recounting their life from beyond the grave? It doesn't make it Sunset Boulevard you know?! That device, along with them seeing visions of their future or former self at key stages of the narrative, just makes it tacky and tawdry, as if Anna Nicole Smith's life needed to be depicted any more tackier than it unfortunately was! Equally, the film rushes blindly through so many key moments of her life that it becomes something of a rollercoaster - and not in a good way.

Actress Agnes Bruckner has the unenviable task of bringing the larger than life model back to life, but bluntly, she isn't large enough. Even at her most glamourous, Anna Nicole Smith was a delightfully rounded young woman and there's just no way Bruckner is broad enough in the beam to portray her. They do pad her up in scenes depicting and recreating the disastrous reality show of her life (to go along with the impressive prosthetic breasts they have given her) but it's somewhat too little too late. Nevertheless she portrays her with enough empathy and heart and manages to nail some of the beguiling allure and goofiness that was so inherent in Anna Nicole. Her relationship with her son Daniel is also nicely captured and Bruckner plays these moments very well. 

Veteran actor Martin Landau plays her aged sugar daddy J Howard Marshall and this is a very sensitive depiction which shows a man truly in love with her, regardless. Unfortunately the film doesn't dwell at all on their two year courtship courtship, preferring to show their meeting at the strip club where Anna worked before going straight into a scene, some time later, showing Marshall giving her his ranch.

The film also explores her relationship with the other Howard in her life, her lawyer and companion Howard K Stern (played by Adam Goldberg) but carefully avoids picking a side in the continuing debate as to whether this man provided well intentioned support in the model's later years or whether he was in fact her primary enabler as anyone who has viewed the now infamous clown make up video footage may shudder to recall. The film also avoids relating the commitment ceremony Anne Nicole made with Howard just seven days after her son's death from an overdose, preferring instead to rush head long from his tragic demise to her own in similar circumstances five months later leaving behind her baby daughter and no, the subsequent paternity drama isn't dwelt upon here either.  

Ultimately, the issue with Harron's biopic is that it prefers to linger on the basic facts of Anna Nicole's life but refuses to dip its toe into the far murkier waters of the psychology, on what caused her personal demons and insecurities or just why she felt the need to use drugs an alcohol as such a devastating crutch throughout her all too brief life. A lack of substance makes this a missed opportunity and once again the real appreciation and understanding that Anna Nicole strove for and ultimately deserved in life remains just as elusive in death.

RIP

Crimes and Misdemeanors (1989)

"God is an illusion I can't afford"

One of Woody's more serious, darker films Crimes and Misdemeanors precedes Match Point in its story of murder and morality and its a beautifully crafted, well plotted and technically assured piece of filmmaking. 

"The Eyes of God are upon us"

Ostensibly a morality play and one that concerns itself with the notion of religion as a man made system in place to control our world, Crimes and Misdemeanors has a glorious metaphor running throughout about sight and blindness, light and dark and the value of money. This is most prominent in its depiction of Judah (Martin Landau) the rich and successful ophthalmologist whose life could be ruined is his mistress (Anjelica Huston) makes their affair public, and in his patient Ben (Sam Waterston) a kind and devout Rabbi who is slowly going blind - he's by no means a pivotal character, but what he represents is clearly very important to the structure and tone of the piece. 

Their outlooks on life, which they have shared back and forth for years, are radically different; Ben is optimistic and sees the best in people and believes things are God's plan whilst Judah is cynical and believes people are inherently immoral. Haunted by his father's words that God sees all things it's almost like he tests those words, himself and God when he agrees to his shady brother's suggestion to kill his mistress to keep the status quo of his home and work life. In what becomes the perfect crime, Judah realises God does not exist because he has not, and will not, be punished. As Judah later recounts, life is defined by your own choices, and in conclusion it is perhaps those seen as immoral that ultimately win out in Crimes and Misdemeanors.

This notion is further contrasted by the subplot featuring Woody himself as a down at heel documentary filmmaker whose successful TV producer brother in law (Alan Alda) throws him a bone by getting him to make a documentary about himself and his superficial yet well received career; Allen is seen to be moral - even to the extent of being thrown into a quandary when he becomes attracted to production assistant Mia Farrow, despite his failing marriage, he can't leave his wife for her - earnest and a deep thinker but its all for naught because the fame, adulation, acclaim and even the girl (Farrow) ultimately goes to the shallow Alda. 

"I believe in God...I know it...because without God the world is a cesspool"

It's a depressing and pessimistic thought I'll grant you, but it's one we can all see the truth in, especially perhaps in the morally corrupt, financially fixated and selfish 1980s (and its interesting to review this just a day after a rewatch of what is seen as the populist and ultimate ''Greed is Good'' 80s New York movie Wall Street) The message is that sometimes the good things don't necessarily happen to those who behave 'good' in life; like the philosopher whom Allen's character would rather be making a documentary about says, we live in a cold universe which we invest in emotions to give it a moral structure, but its clear the universe is still cold as the philosopher in question ends up committing suicide, because he was lonely and alone. The saving grace of Crimes and Misdemeanors is that whilst Judah may get away with murder and may continue to enjoy his prosperous success and the love of his family, equally Ben - who we see in the final scene now totally blind and dancing with his daughter at her wedding - will never lose his faith and the love and warmth that gives him and those around him.  It's main message perhaps is one that says all you can do is hope to teach those around you, specifically the next generation (as we see through the flashbacks to Landau's childhood, Ben and his daughter and in the touching quirky relationship between Allen and his niece watching old movies) what you believe to be right and wrong and trust them to find their own way. 

"I'm talking about reality, if you want a happy ending you should go see a Hollywood movie"