St. Elmo's Fire

Bad. Really bad. The writing--by director Joel Schumacher and Carl Kurlander--is utterly preposterous. It's about the fear of encroaching adulthood that upsets the relationships of seven tight-knit college friends. Some of them self-destruct so ridiculously and so unexpectedly (such as Emilio Estevez, who becomes obsessed with a girl he dated once and starts stalking her) that all you can do is laugh, while others are too obviously predetermined to some kind of tragic separate peace. For example: Demi Moore, playing the vapid, cocaine-addicted party girl who's buying everything on credit and sleeping with her married boss. These people stab each other in the back with relish and laugh it off as they slide the knife back out. It's hard to care about characters who are so obviously the concoction of a slick Hollywood marketing campaign, complete with a sentimental music score that forces the audience to feel sympathetic toward them. With Rob Lowe as the alcoholic rock star/party animal who always seems to be carrying his saxophone around, Judd Nelson and Ally Sheedy as the not-so-happy co-habitating couple, Andrew McCarthy as the pensive, cynical writer who's in love with Sheedy, Mare Winningham as the frumpy friend who loves Rob Lowe too much, Martin Balsam, and Andie McDowell as Emilio's obsession, who delivers perhaps the worst performance of the movie. (Her character strikes a heavy blow toward women's lib: when the stalker crashes a party she's at, she takes him home to talk things out!) David Foster composed the sappy music, which you've probably heard on the radio before. 110 min. 1985. ★½

Cuba

If Sean Connery's James Bond was about English political dominance, Sean Connery's Robert Dapes is about its political irrelevance. In Cuba (1979), which is set in Havana in the year 1959, Connery plays a British mercenary who's hired by the Batista regime to help them stop Castro from taking over. (Viewers shouldn't be shocked by how that ends up.) Dapes is never particularly invested in the job, but that seems to be true of his attitude in general. He's a jaded ex-soldier who has accepted the ways of the modern world and has learned how to capitalize on them. While in Havana, he runs into an old flame, Alex (Brooke Adams), now married into a prominent Cuban family. Alex runs her husband's factory while he runs around with women. (He's also fond of booze and gambling.) Their marriage is unhappy, but she likes the control she has over him, doling out money to him when he needs it, and managing their capital.

Cuba isn't bad. Director Richard Lester has a clever sense of humor, which keeps this from being self-serious. It's sort of a modern-day Casablanca, except that nobody saw it in 1979 and nobody remembers it now. And while it is about 20 minutes too long, Cuba is generally a fascinating (perhaps unreliable) piece of quasi-historical filmmaking. What's perhaps most historically accurate isn't its take on the Castro revolution, but its depiction of American culture's pervasiveness in Cuba. Everywhere Lester's camera turns we see Cubans inundated with Western capitalist ideals: from the grandson of one of the generals playing Monopoly with his grandfather, to the "Mr. Clean" commercial playing on the television set while a seemingly unresponsive elderly woman stares at it, to the General watching a private screening of Horror of Dracula (a British film, but it qualifies as a Western influence nonetheless).

Brooke Adams, ever the photogenic actress, radiates in Cuba. She's a stunning beauty, and her dark hair makes the New York-born actress believably Latina (maybe not Cuban, necessarily) even when her accent falters periodically. The chemistry between Connery and Adams seems off, but there's something oddly fitting about it at the same time: it's a jaded, unworkable romance for the jaded soldier. Alex is spoiled and selfish but also sympathetic. And Dapes is stubborn but not unfeeling.

And a cast of amusing supporting characters populates Lester's Havana: Chris Sarandon as Alex's arrogant beauty of a husband, Hector Elizondo as one of Batista's men, hired to accompany Dapes (he begins something of an amiable sidekick), Jack Weston as a sleazy American investor, Martin Balsam as General Bello, Lonette McKee as Sarandon's girl on the side, Danny De La Paz as her Castro-infatuated younger brother, who's a pawn of the revolutionaries, and Walter Gotell. Written by Charles Wood. Filmed--convincingly--in Spain. 122 min. ★★½

Breakfast at Tiffany's

Breakfast at Tiffany's (1961) showcases Audrey Hepburn's glamorous loveliness, and it probably cemented people's equating of Hepburn with cool cosmopolitan chic. But the movie's a bore, stretched out with lots of unconvincing little vignettes until it reaches its blatantly obvious conclusion. Hepburn plays Holly Golightly, a frivolous girl who lives on the cash of wealthy gentlemen, and throws loud parties in her cramped East Side apartment in New York, to the chagrin of her landlord (Mickey Rooney made up to look Japanese. He's a caricature, the embodiment of what Americans think of when they use the slur, "Jap.") Holly becomes friends with her new neighbor, Paul (George Peppard), whom she calls "Fred." Paul's a writer who gets paid to sleep with a wealthy interior decorator (Patricia Neal), which in turn funds his burgeoning literary career.

As I understand it, the relationship between George and Holly in Truman Capote's novel was considerably more Will-and-Grace than it is in the movie. Screenwriter George Axelrod turned Paul from gay to straight, and made him into the one redemptive love interest in Holly's long line of "rats" and "super rats," the men she pursues for her love of money. But it's so hard to want Paul and Holly to get together when she treats him with such indifference at times. She's flighty, and when she's not being impetuous and charming, she's distastefully rotten, and her self-absorption, which is always apparent, becomes overt and offensive. Paul's a nice guy, Holly's the girl he can't have. When he finally unmasks her at the end, breaking her stubbornness, you wish he could have told her earlier. The film would have been shorter and far less irritating.

The problem with a lot of Audrey Hepburn's movies is that directors and screenwriters are always trying to turn her into something "real" or "deep." She can't just be chic and stylish, and her stylishness can never come from within. It always has to come from somewhere or someone else. She has to be a country girl who's come to the Big Apple to re-invent herself (as in Breakfast at Tiffany's), or a chauffeur's daughter who goes to Paris to get culture (as in Sabrina), or a poor flower girl in My Fair Lady whose source of sophistication comes from a snide old fuddy-duddy of a linguistics professor.

The movies that let Audrey be Audrey, naturally, and with nobody to credit her stylishness to but herself, are the ones that have held up best. I'm thinking most particularly about Charade (1963), which never tries to go serious on us, the way Breakfast at Tiffany's does. It's always proudly and shrewdly displaying its enchanting trashiness. Breakfast at Tiffany's creates contrived complications to try and elevate itself. Had the tone remained light, the way it is for about half an hour, this could have been a comedy classic of its era, something smarter and more off-beat than the run-of-the-mill Doris Day-Rock Hudson vehicles and other such romantic comedies from the 1960s. Instead, it's remembered as a gooey romance, or rather, it's remembered as an Audrey Hepburn runway, where she can show off her attractiveness. (Which would have been find, had the movie been content to be light and frivolous rather than heavy and mildly portentious.)

George Peppard, as the co-star, is nice and sincere. He doesn't stand out, but then, he's playing it straight to Audrey's ultra-off-kilter personality. Axelrod tries to write dialogue, some of it likely right from Capote's novel, that will become instant trash-poetry when it comes out of Hepburn's mouth. It doesn't always work out that way. (Joseph L. Mankiewicz got damn lucky with Bette Davis in All About Eve: every line was gold when spoken by Margo Channing.) As director, Blake Edwards should have referred more to his comic abilities and less to his sentimental ones. This feels like a less-weapy-eyed prologue to Days of Wine and Roses, saved from being maudlin by the notorious happy ending, where man, woman, and Cat are united.

With Buddy Ebsen, Martin Balsam, Alan Reed, and Jose Luis de Vilallonga. 

Psycho

Psycho may be Alfred Hitchcock's most famous thriller, because of its two notorious scenes of violence. Aesthetically and thematically, Psycho stands apart from the other films generally cited as among the director's best (Rebecca, Strangers on a Train, Rear Window, Vertigo, and North By Northwest). It was independently financed by Hitchcock, and shot with the same crew that worked on his television show, Alfred Hitchcock Presents. And so it lacks the silky glamour of his 50s films, and is a decidedly more American Gothic than Rebecca, even though both films are about powerful women who manage to maintain control of people and places from beyond the grave.

Because of its filming conditions, Psycho resembles television more than the movies, and its dramatics are corny the way 1950s television dramas were. (It's also economical the way TV has to be.) The story is straightforward, less sophisticated than a lot of Hitchcock's movies (e.g. Rear Window) and less darkly humorous (e.g. Strangers on a Train), but it has all the tantalizingly delicious Freudian psychology of Oedipus and Vertigo, fashioned compactly into a thriller that reshaped the way people made thrillers, and the way people saw them and talked about them and wrote about them. And somehow, its corniness, its simplicity, its one-track direction toward the big reveal, all work for it. Psycho wouldn't have been as memorable, I don't think, if Hitchcock had made it like his other movies.

Hitchcock can never be accused of putting on airs in his movies: he's at his best when he revels in the low arts. His apparently instinctive approach to movies as low art has made his work deliciously entertaining, much like Howard Hawks's The Big Sleep (1946), Orson Welles's Touch of Evil (1958), and Stanley Donen's Charade (1963) (three of the great American thrillers). I think most if not all good thrillers are inherently comfortable with their vulgarity. These movies deal with seedy people whose complicated lives are far from glamorous or tidy. Norman Bates is a genuine lunatic with the most dangerous facade of them all: the facade of a sweet, friendly, handsome boy-next-door. He's a villain who's sympathetic, dominated by the even more villainous presence of his mother. And Marion Crane (Janet Leigh) isn't the pure heroine: she's a thief (a one-time thief, but still a thief).

Hitchcock's previous films were certainly suspenseful, but they weren't so centered around the big reveal at the end. People didn't expect the movie's only star, Janet Leigh, to be slashed to death midway through the film, and they didn't expect the movie to then shift gears and be about Norman Bates and the secrets lurking in his creepy old house. I would imagine that even those who had read Robert Bloch's 1959 novel--on which Psycho was based--were expecting some Hollywood-style changes to protect the heroine from the grisly fate of being butchered in the shower. That simply couldn't happen.


With Vera Miles, John Gavin, and Martin Balsam.