WHO IS HARRY KELLERMAN AND WHY IS HE SAYING THOSE TERRIBLE THINGS ABOUT ME?Plot In A Nutshell
Ulu Grosbard’s 1971 comedy/drama about George Soloway (Dustin Hoffman), a hugely successful pop songwriter reflecting on his life while hiding out in his penthouse apartment from his business managers, flying his private plane over New York City, spending sessions with his shrink (Jack Warden), and trying to figure out why someone he’s never heard of is spreading nasty rumours about him among his friends and family.
Thoughts
Remembered these days (if at all) for its loony title, WIHKAWIHSTTTAM? is one of a handful of wild-card titles in Dustin Hoffman’s early film career, along with those weird Italian/Spanish co-productions Madigan’s Millions and Alfredo, Alfredo that Hoffman agreed to do for some reason. (Maybe a quick buck before the big Papillon/Marathon Man paycheque parts started rolling in.) But it’s easy to see Hoffman looking at a goofy lark like Kellerman as a welcome holiday from the heavy lifting he was doing around the same time in Midnight Cowboy, Little Big Man, and Straw Dogs. In Kellerman, he basically only needs to shuffle around in his bathrobe, strum his guitar, flash his boyish smile, and sing a couple of Shel Silverstein songs in his appealingly untrained voice.
Kellerman is one of those surreal, self-indulgent artist-in-crisis movies that a lot of directors felt they suddenly had license to make in the wake of Fellini’s 8½ — Alex in Wonderland is another one — and it may be the least interesting of all of them. The world of 8½ was in constant bustle, and it had a sense of proportion in its portrayal of Marcello Mastroianni’s midlife crisis; in Kellerman, Hoffman seems merely like a spoiled narcissist, and he’s practically alone onscreen for much of the running time. It’s not a lot of fun being alone with a narcissist, especially one whose problems are all self-created. (Literally so, as the film’s unsurprising twist ending reveals.)
But then, very late in the film, a miracle happens: Barbara Harris enters the story as a would-be singer auditioning for Hoffman, and she sits on a chair on an empty stage, one hand gripping the ghost light, unable to let go of it, and she delivers this amazing extended monologue about how today is her 34th birthday and yet she still doesn’t feel prepared to live her life. It’s a very stagy speech in a lot of ways — the script is by Herb Gardner, author of A Thousand Clowns — but boy, does Harris sell it, especially when she talks about splurging on an expensive hairdo and eyelash treatment that she couldn’t really afford just to look nice at this hail-Mary pass of an audition. The only other notable Harris performance I’ve seen (not counting the original Freaky Friday, as the mom who switches bodies with Jodie Foster) is, of course, as Albuquerque, the aspiring singer who winds up in the spotlight at the end of Nashville — she’s very good at playing women clinging tenaciously, even foolishly, to their creative dreams. (I also note, upon consulting her IMDb entry, that four years earlier, Harris appeared in Oh Dad, Poor Dad, Mama’s Hung You in the Closet and I’m Feeling So Sad, so she really had the market cornered on idiotically long titles.)
The other thing that struck me about Kellerman was that it seemed like a huge, unacknowledged influence on Woody Allen’s films of the late ’70s — indeed, with its neurotic Jewish sensibility, its habit of interrupting serious scenes with outrageous sight gags, the long, static compositions from Hoffman’s point of view, with characters talking into the camera, Kellerman is the sort of film that Annie Hall might have turned into if Allen had been a little less lucky in the editing room. Also, the shots of Hoffman’s apartment, whose walls are decorated with enormous blow-ups of magazine covers featuring Hoffman’s face, anticipates the sets in Stardust Memories, as do the scenes of Hoffman being besieged by agents, managers, and assorted business types, hounding him with song suggestions and job offers he wants nothing to do with.
I always thought Allen’s cinematic inspirations stopped after Ingmar Bergman — it’s amazing to think that the only film made after 1970 that he borrowed from might be Who Is Harry Kellerman.
RATING: 2/5
* * * * *
THE UNKNOWNPlot In A Nutshell
Tod Browning’s 1927 silent classic starring Lon Chaney as a thief who hides out in a traveling circus, posing as an armless knife-thrower, and falls in love with his beautiful assistant (Joan Crawford), a woman with a neurotic phobia about being touched.
Thoughts
I’m speechless. Few movies can claim to have a plot as delirious as this one — and yet, there’s a wonderful inevitability to each insane development that reminds me of Sweeney Todd. I knew going in that Chaney’s character (who bills himself as “Alonzo the Armless” — catchy!) was only pretending to have no arms, but I was delightfully shocked to learn the reason for his masquerade: he has two thumbs fused together on one hand, which would make his fingerprints a dead giveaway to the cops investigating the string of robberies taking place in every city where Chaney’s circus performs. (Together, the two thumbs look vaguely like a heart — a lovely touch.) And then, when Chaney blackmails a surgeon into amputating his arms for real so that he can ask Crawford to marry him... oh my God, the idea is so operatic and played with such conviction, it’s intoxicating.
Speaking of opera, a classical composer here in Edmonton recently approached me with the idea that we should try writing an opera together. I promised to try and think of a story — and now I’m thinking that The Unknown would be perfect operatic material. The story is so outrageous that it could probably only work in song, the setting is properly exotic, and certainly the emotions are larger than life. I don’t know how we’d stage the climax, which would require us to put two horses onstage, each running on a treadmill, but I figure that’s a problem for the director and the set designer, not me.
RATING: 4.5/5
0 Yorumlar