Saturday, November 19, 2016

Movie break (Quick Vu): An American-dream anxiety/rot-tale told with a “duality” family nexus: The King of Marvin Gardens (1972), Part 2 of 2

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An artful attempt to scope American decline in a semi-desperate reunion of two brothers

Sixteenth in my 1970s series, which is now headed Did Kids Really Wear All Those Purple Clothes?  (replaces the heading “Patchouli and B.O.” (a recollection of the ’70s))  [for more info on my film-review banners, see here]

Subsections below:
[introduction]
Character details I didn’t get
The dated aspect of the Black gangsters
David as a writer
Burstyn’s Sally and what she means

[Edits 11/21/16.]

You should see Part 1 to get some essential details about this film before you read the following. The King of Marvin Gardens was the second respectable-drama film directed (and partly written) by Bob Rafelson; the first was Five Easy Pieces (1970).

(Rafelson had previously been working in TV and films, but with low-budget or decidedly countercultural works; he helped develop the TV show The Monkees [1966-68] and directed the Monkees’ swan-song film Head [1968], which had writing help from Jack Nicholson. Rafelson and his partner Bert Schneider also provided the producing company behind Easy Rider [1969], in which Nicholson first came to major critical notice as an actor. Some more info on Rafelson’s and Schneider’s early career can be found in Part 1 of this review, as well as in a book by Peter Biskind [End note 1] that I haven’t had access to for some years. Further info on them is also available in a book on Nicholson [End note 2].)

For Five Easy Pieces, Rafelson had the services of writer Carole Eastman, and he changed a few details in her story (not entirely pleasing her, I understand). For Marvin Gardens, he had producing help from Harold Schneider, according to film credits (I don’t know if Bert Schneider was in the producing background of this film, as part of BBS Productions, which made both these films). The screenwriter for Marvin was Jacob Brackman, though Rafelson seems to have originated more of this story than he had that for FEP.

Marvin is less impressive a film than FEP, though I wish I had seen it more (my schedule and the nature of the DVD I got made this difficult). If you are able only to see one or two Rafelson films, I would strongly recommend FEP; and perhaps The Postman Always Rings Twice (1981), which I haven’t seen, is worth a look. Marvin, while interesting (for me anyway, as a 1970s connoisseur of sorts), is quirky and “slight” enough—Rafelson, after all, was an early example of what would today be called an “indie” director—that I think many young film students wouldn’t want to take the time to see it.

Part 1 gives important orienting info; the following picks up from that.


Character details I didn’t get

I viewed this film all the way through once (with skips in the DVD), and rewatched a little less than half. The main characters in the informal “family” focused on are (1) brothers David and Jason Staebler (played by Nicholson and Bruce Dern, respectively); and (2) Jason’s consort/girlfriend Sally (Ellen Burstyn) and (3) her stepdaughter (I didn’t get the “step” part from the film) Jessica (Julia Anne Robinson, who died in the 1970s at a young age). Some details surrounding the women (as conveyed in the Wikipedia article on the film) I didn’t get from the film (my own fault, I admit; for one thing, some lines went past me). The Wiki article also says that Sally is “manic-depressive”—which I didn’t get, but which doesn’t surprise me—and a “former beauty queen” (no surprise; still trying to be, it seems) “and prostitute,” the latter of which I didn’t get from the film at all. This, of course, adds to the tackiness and “earthy 1970s drama” qualities of the story.

The Wiki article says Jason is in the process of “conning a Japanese syndicate” into his buying a Hawaiian island, etc. I didn’t realize the Oriental men were from a syndicate, and I don’t know if this is meant to say they were mobsters or Japanese-style Mafia. The Wiki article also says Jason is (with reaching out to David for help) pursuing a scam, though I didn’t fully get that (with this project) he was merely being a con artist; I thought he had a legitimate business prospect, though it was still on shaky ground (though, today, the distinction between a manically-pursued business venture and a con game seems thin, in so many instances, indeed). In any event, enough about the business dealings Jason is focusing on seems shaky that, whether he’s downright criminal with it or not, we can appreciate that the larger picture of this story concerns “the shady side of town,” including such piquant, striving individuals as Jason.

Incidentally, the Wiki article talks about how the film shows numerous grand old hotels that were once archetypal A.C. landmarks that were, shortly afterward, torn down to make way for newer casino/hotels. Those who are interested in the history of A.C. might seek out the film just for these glimpses, because Kovacs’ photography certainly gives them a distinguished portrait of “an old, faded world.”


The dated aspect of the Black gangsters

The Wiki article says Jason had been working for a gang boss—this particular nature of working I didn’t fully, consciously get on watching (I thought Jason merely was in hock to him, or such), but it makes sense.

You may start to ask, “If you didn’t get so much of the scams going on, why are you writing about the film?,” and my answer would be, “You know, the details of these scams may not be as much worth figuring out as such would be in, say, a smart Coens film; Marvin Gardens is an also-ran film from an old time, which may be ‘irrelevant’ enough that modern audiences wouldn’t want to see it [see my comments about Don Shiach’s ranking of critically-top 1970s films in End note 1 of Part 1]. So I would advise seeing Rafelson’s Five Easy Pieces; but if you want to gorge on Rafelson films, or just get a taste of ‘earthy, 1970s downer-ending fare,’ Marvin is good to compare with FEP.”

However, what struck me like a brick when I first watched Marvin was the dated, and rather benighted, element of having the gang be primarily Black (never mind the oddity of casting Scatman Crothers, an avuncular sort with a winning, teeth-prominent smile, as a gang boss). Of course, we know that, perhaps likely enough in the 1970s and no less today, gangsters with whom someone may get snared in terms of loan-sharking or whatever else can be of a variety of races or ethnic groups—Hispanic, Asian, whatever. But with this film, it would seem, especially where run-down Atlantic City was concerned, that the issue was to have readily recognizable “mafiosos” of a certain stripe be involved with Jason. Still, why were Blacks used here?

Films, up until The Godfather (1972), which practically singlehandedly rewrote the book on Hollywood’s dealing with this, were awkward about dealing with gangsters that were “quintessentially city player” types. Even The French Connection (1971), which dealt with a real-life drug-dealing criminal enterprise that involved the Mafia, seems to muddy the identity of “who the circle of crooks was.” FC included some Italianate players (like “franchisee” point-people Sal Boca and his wife Angie); it also included an apparent Jewish moneyman in Leo Weinstock. But famously amid the street culture, which the film presented as “just what insidious lowlife our hero Popeye Doyle had to resort to tough measures to deal with,” were a lot of Black characters (as consumers more than major “players”), mainly those who used drugs—which the heroin dealers had as their primary consumer base.

In fact, an early sequence in FC has Popeye and his colleague Cloudy chasing (over a series of street blocks) an Afro’d man who was doing some low-level dealing in a bar. This was at the time, I would suggest, anachronistic in a way that today’s viewers might not realize: the film’s real-life story happened about 10 years before, in about 1961. Certainly the Italian-American Mafia was in full flower then (the famous 1957 meeting of various families in upstate New York was only a few years before). As for Blacks’ being in 1961 the overwhelming majority of buyers of imported illegal drugs, that may (or may not) have been true; but in 1961, Black-American culture did not have the pulsing/burgeoning, soul-music-listening, big-Afro-headed “face” that it did by 1971, and (even if this is a sort of cosmetic feature) it is this culture that the film presents for its middle-class American audience (among whom there was no small amount of Archie Bunker types).

My point is that FC seemed (or seems in retrospect) to traffic in, for its white audiences, presenting criminal “street life” in New York as if (as the root of much evil in NYC society) all Blacks were hanging out in shady bars in the city, waiting to “get well,” as the slang was, in terms of partaking of a new heroin shipment. You don’t see in FC any Black characters who are on the side of whites and decent society (except for the undercover informant for whom Popeye tries to maintain his “disguise” by shoving and slugging him mercilessly in between getting info out of him in a pay toilet). In fact, subsequent re-viewings of FC get across how dated the racial situation seems in this regard.

Marvin Gardens seems to fall right in with this “marketing set of concerns.” It is part of the film’s artful—some might say too self-conscious—way of portraying “what characters are about” that the only Black people of note are some who cut a putatively menacing figure on the street—whether with Afro and stylish sunglasses, or as an avuncular “don” sort in Scatman Crothers—and are part of the gang that Jason is entangled with. Remember, in the early 1970s, the only real ferment of films that focused on Black street culture comprised the respectable-enough likes of Shaft (1971) and the other (often lesser-in-quality) Blaxploitation films.

(I wish I could have watched Marvin all the way through a second time, to get more of the Black-gang subplot. For one thing, a late scene where Nicholson’s David is meeting with a gangster in a mall-like area seems, visually, to play on early-’70s stereotypes, but comes across as gripping nonetheless—though I couldn’t get all the dialogue. And a subsequent scene with David meeting with Crothers’ Louis in a sort of brave-adult tete-a-tete, over a stiff drink, seems nicely staged, if it left me puzzled as to what was going on.)

Maybe, after all, we can be sympathetic to Rafelson and say that this story looked at a man (Jason) who happened to be involved with (among alternatives) a Black gang, while the Italian Mafia was the one more insinuated throughout Atlantic City street culture. Who knows. Anyway, this Black-gang detail made the film seem especially dated.


David as a writer

Nicholson has a quiet time in this film (unlike in FEP), as the putatively depressive radio-show talker. The first sequence of the film, with David speaking into a microphone, with Nicholson’s head framed in black, may remind you of a famous monologue by Marlon Brando near the end of Apocalypse Now (1979)—with the actor put on his mettle by needing to deliver good acting amid a quiet recitation, with his head right in our face, in relief against black background. David is telling an ostensible story of having, years ago with his brother, killed his grandfather by allowing the old man to choke on fish bones, after the informal family tradition had been to give the old man a piece of bread to eat to “wash down” the fish bones every time this choking event started. David remarks that he and his brother were “accomplices” from then on. We find later that, after David goes home, his grandfather is alive and well in their apartment—and the old man makes fun of David’s radio story, which the old man had apparently heard, by coughing at him extravagantly.

Rafelson in a DVD extra says that this monologue was from a story he had written as his first English assignment in college many years before; he had apparently gotten in some trouble with the school for it. Here, in addition to being somewhat quaint in its own right, it serves as a contrasting factor to another radio story at the film’s end that David tells, shaken, based on what he has just been through in real life with his brother. There are some tasty lines from this, but as not to spoil it for you, I won’t recount them.

I would note, though, that Rafelson (or someone else) says Nicholson wrote this last monologue himself. And indeed, it is remarkable to recall how many times Nicholson has written parts of his own dialogue for a film, even major ones that made him as a star. As Shiach (amid other sources) notes, Nicholson started in the film industry as a writer (at least part of the time), and apparently he was willing to consider staying in that line of work if acting didn’t pan out (he would also direct films over the years, including Drive, He Said [~1971], Goin’ South [1978], and The Two Jakes [1990]). But once his “acting star” started to rise with Easy Rider and then FEP, he would stay focused mainly on acting.

But he wrote parts of his dialogue as follows: some of the ending scene of Chinatown (1974), with a group of characters in Chinatown shortly before Mrs. Mulwray is shot (when he says about Noah Cross that he’s “crazy,” etc.); the monologue by Bobby Dupea to his father near the end of FEP; in The Shining (1980), the scene (or part of it) when Jack Torrance is telling Wendy that when she comes in when he’s writing, she distracts him (and he curses her out, eventually). How many other instances of this writing his lines he’s done, I don’t know.


Burstyn’s Sally and what she means

The last thing I would comment on is the pathetic situation of Sally, played by Ellen Burstyn, an actress so prominent in those days that she had notable roles in Peter Bogdanovich’s The Last Picture Show (1971), William Friedkin’s The Exorcist (1973), and Martin Scorsese’s Alice Doesn’t Live Here Anymore (1974).

I commented above on what I failed to gather about Sally (but was corrected on by Wikipedia) when watching the film. The aspect of her hankering after winning a Miss America pageant seems pathetic—I mean, this may have resonated among 1972 audiences as a credible story of a “pathetic woman holding onto one tacky type of American dream,” whereas today it would seem a less-than-credible story of that type. (Today, a likely prospect for a darkly humorous film might be how young hopefuls still flock to participate in beauty pageants but run the risk of being taken advantage of by a business impresario who later has dreams of becoming U.S. president—and actually does become that. Maybe that story seems too unlikely.)

But Rafelson has Sally’s situation follow a kind of story arc when she eventually burns her clothes, makeup, toiletries, etc., in a bonfire on the beach (this had a kind of 1970s, if posturing, “burning the old idols” feel to it). I guess if I kept in mind that she was supposed to be manic-depressive, this would make her actions more credible, if on the pathetic side. (I only saw this bit once, hence my tentativeness.)

The big set piece where Jason, David, Sally, and Jessica are having a pretend “Miss America show” in a big assembly room (with Sally playing a giant organ) is amusing in the sort of way of “check out this semi-improvised, low-budget filmmaking bit.” I mean, sometimes a low-budget film is fascinating for how well it pulls off a scene, with the production parsimoniously using what limited means there were, and still getting a good dramatizing effect. And Jack Nicholson rises to the occasion, not just doing a sonorous Bert Parks imitation, but singing too.

This scene has a way of getting a societal-criticism point across by means of creative filmmaking, and as lets us enjoy how an old film could do this, in accord with how we presume audiences (who might have been jaundiced about such old beauty pageants by then) could have indulged and/or appreciated this (and, for a quite different film style, even Kubrick’s A Clockwork Orange [1971] has ways of presenting set pieces that may, in modern days, seem dated/improvised in some ways to the unsympathetic, and to the sympathetic [the fan and/or “curating film connoisseur”], due to the story-points being made, nicely intriguing).

But also, what can we infer is the point about Sally (and Jessica)? That, to the extent they still have dreams of winning a beauty pageant, they are about as pathetic (or poignant) as the two hitchhiking hippies are in FEP?

I don’t have a whole lot of conclusions to make about how this film sums up the decaying aspects of American society in 1972, but as you can see, there are interesting things to glean here, but mainly for the true film scholar.

##

End note 1.  Peter Biskind, Easy Riders, Raging Bulls: How the Sex-Drugs-and-Rock ’n’ Roll Generation Saved Hollywood (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1998).

End note 2.  Don Shiach, Jack Nicholson: The Complete Film Guide (London: B.T. Batsford, 1999).