Elliot's Watching Week of 8-1-21: Ronan Farrow, Fassbinder, J.K. Rowling, and a classic Western

 Elliot’s Watching - Week of 8-1-21: Catch & Kill, Despair, Strike, and 7 Men

Ronan Farrow’s 6-part documentary, Catch and Kill (HBO), is pretty much as it says: The Podcast Tapes. If you’ve listened to the podcasts (I hadn’t) there’s not much value added in this cinema/documentary version - almost all of the significant footage consists of the interviews that formed the basis of RF’s reporting on the Havey Weinstein, rapist. That said: This is still a great series for a lot of reasons: RF’s intrepid and brave reporting, the nefarious nature of HW which no doubt was well known and quietly tolerated across the whole entertainment industry, the cowardice of NBC news in ordering RF to kill the report and walking away from it, the boldness of the New Yorker in choosing to stick with RF and to run the story after scrupulous fact-checking, and the frightening attempts to intimidate RF and to dirty him up in fruitless efforts to kill the report or tarnish its veracity. I have nothing but praise for RF, a guy who could have chosen a much easier pathway in life, could have gotten all kinds of jobs and opportunities based on his connection to Hollywood/cultural elite, but who chose to pursue journalism and not in some half-assed, celebrity-kissing way but through the rigors or serious and dangerous reporting over many years and the extreme difficulty of writing a nonfiction book as well. We can see from these recordings that he’s a terrific interviewer and willing to push and probe and follow up on leads to get to the truth. And the truth - the power the HW wielded in the industry and the sense that his criminal behavior was so widely tolerated and the a major media outlet could be bullied by him and his minions into silence - all quite astonishing and depressing, but many kudos to RF for pursuing this path and bringing the truth to light. 

Seldom, maybe never, have such an array of illuminati and the talented been brought together in such a dismal failure as the 1978 film Despair: based on the novel by Nabokov (high literary props), adapted (I’ll say!) for the screen by Tom Stoppard (higher props), directed by Rainer Warner Fassbinder (first English-language film), starring Dirk Bogarde (art-film star) - and finally what a mess. First of all, Nabokov’s novel (1934) is ridiculously inappropriate for a film; like most of his work, this novel was a vehicle for VN to show that he’s smarter than his readers, knows more languages and can write well in any, and he’s a master at creating thoroughly unlikable narrators - all of which says to me, lousy movie. Then, how did Stoppard get involved? He seems to have had no sense in how to build a dramatic plot. The plot such as it is involves a German  Hermann (Bogarde) in Prague (?) on a business trip encounters on the street a man who looks like his double; he concocts a plan to “murder himself” in order to, I guess, start a new life under the now dead man’s ID. Potentially good - but Stoppard was unwilling to break the bonds of VN’s meandering narrative and make this an exciting story of murder and doom. Not much happens; the killing itself is ridiculous; and the film (not sure about the novel, I didn’t finish reading it) ends in some postmodern nonsense: I’m just a character in a movie, wearing for freedom, blah blah. as for Fassbinder, he seems to have been lost in the English language, as the speeches are wooden and strange without being moving or provocative; he does seem interested in the somewhat louche aspects of the novel, in particular the failed artist who hangs around with Hermann’s wife - a chance it seems for RWF to peer, as he so often has in much better films, at the underworld and the eccentricities of temper and tempest in the art scene. How that all hangs together, what type of despair could motivate or drive Hermann to kill an innocent man - no answers lie in this film. Despair? Disaster. 

First season (Lethal) of the British (based on J.K. Rowling detective-novel series - I guess she needed the money?) C.B. Strike breaks no new ground - private eye, wounded war veteran, setting up his business in a rented walkup, takes on temp as his secretary, she thrills to and excels in the business as the form a good working partnership with of course the tension being do they fall for each other or remain simply professional colleagues - we’ve seen this before (think: X-files for ex.) - but it’s reasonably entertaining, as Strike ushered to find out whether a London supermodel’s death was suicide or murder and as of course it’s gonna be murder: Who dunit? Like so many detective or police procedurals, the probability of the entire search and research is based more on plot convenience than on any possible reality, so if you can acknowledge from the top that all the stupid clues and leads don’t really matter, that this is a series about a developing relationship/partnership, then it’s OK if not great. If nothing else, Rowling is a total all-star at developing a plot into a series, so this may be worth watching beyond Season 1, though I probably won’t persist. Also worth noting that many of the key lines/important dialog is delivered in a mumbled South London accent that was extremely hard to discern, at least for this American viewer - but if you get only 80 percent of what’s said you’ll get enough to follow along. 

To my chagrin, I’ve never been a fan of Westerns; as a kid, I couldn’t follow the plot lines and never understood the whole mythos of the West. Who were these people in covered wagons, where did they come from, where were they going? Why was everyone so afraid of the “Indians”? Who were the sheriffs and deputies and other “lawmen”? So I’ve pretty much ignored this genre of film except for the absolute highlights such as The Searchers and High Noon. But this week a watched a 1956 Western. Budd Boetticher’s Seven Men from Now,  that’s not on the 100 greatest list by any means, but it totally held my interest and attention - proving once more that a B-movie that accomplishes its goals is better to watch than an A-movie that falls short. Without going through the whole plot line - which holds together far better than most B-movie scripts (thanks, writer Burt Kennedy), it involves a theft of gold from a Wells Fargo branch, an attack in which a woman clerk is killed - and she’s the wife of a out-of-favor lawman, who proceed to search for the 7 robbers who killed her; in the process, he’s called upon to help a totally feckless wagoner who’s heading for California with his young wife. En route, among those whom they cross, is frightening, evil guy - the young Lee Marvin! More than most Westerns, this one game me the sense of the risks and difficulty (and sometimes stupidity) of heading out in wagon without knowing the requisite skills. You get from this film a real sense of the dangerous landscape and the need for grit and independence to get cross-country, let alone to succeed in the West. Among other notable aspects, the score (Henry Vars) captures the mood of the film without overwhelming us with bathos, and of particular note it’s one of the few films of the era,  I think, in which the protagonist seems to understand and sympathize with the soon-to-be oppressed native cultures. It’s not the greatest Western of all time, but it’s an entertaining diversion that carries both a wallop and a message.