Here’s mud in your eye!

On the Bowery 1956 (65 minutes) co-written, directed and produced by Lionel Rogosin and edited by Carl Lerner, with the collaboration of Richard Bagley and Mark Sufrin; restored from original negatives at the Anthology Film Archives in New York by Cineteca del Comune di Bologna.

This classic documentary about alcoholics on Lower Manhattan’s once notorious Bowery stands out because filmmaker Lionel Rogosin reached deep into his subject and touched its heart, mind, soul—and liver.

He did so quietly, with subtlety. Rogosin said that first he spent six months ‘observing’: walking the neighborhood in the shadow of the former Third Avenue elevated subway, drinking in the bars, and meeting his prospective subjects.

‘I go without a camera until I know,’ Rogosin later said in an interview included in The Perfect Team (2009), a ‘making of’ documentary produced and directed by Michael Rogosin, the director’s son, and included in the Milestone DVD set.

Rogosin had been living in the West Village at the time, and found his team at the White Horse Tavern, a gathering place for movie and literary people, many alcoholic. He said that he originally had asked James Agee to write the screenplay, but Agee collapsed and died in a taxi cab (at age 42) before the project got going. Rogosin said that he himself had been drinking heavily at the time. He made several false starts.

The result of this experience is that On the Bowery is more than just the usual images of ‘shuffling figures that once were men’ who cannot handle their drink. Rogosin’s easy naturalism captures what passes for ‘normal’ in this subculture and makes for a harrowing tale told in its own terms.

Rogosin and his collaborators picked three genuine ‘Men of the Bowery’ around whom to structure their narrative of this life: Gorman ‘Doc’ Hendricks, Ray Salyer and Frank Matthews go by their first names.

First we see Ray, purportedly a furloughed railroad worker (and former Army sergeant). A clean-shaven, good-looking and neatly dressed man in his early forties, Ray arrives on the Bowery on a bright morning carrying a small suitcase, going into a bar for a beer and conversation.

A table of four ‘fellow railroad men’ invites Ray to join them—and to stand them a bottle of ‘muscatel’ (fortified) wine while he is at it.

Gorman, to whom Rogosin dedicated the film, an articulate man of late middle age, joins the party. The original four men melt away when the bottle is empty.

‘Those guys sure took off,’ Ray says to Gorman.

‘They didn’t see any more in evidence, so naturally they’re going to go,’ Gorman replies.

Ray tells Gorman that he is low on money and wants ‘a drink and a flop’. Gorman suggests that Ray sell the contents of his suitcase; he can help steer him right. It turns out that Gorman has more in mind than cadging a drink or two from Ray. And, appearances and an expressed desire to make a clean start aside, Ray is interested mainly in drinking.

The film follows these men, as well as Frank, who collects scrap cardboard with a cart that has ‘Joey’s’ painted on the side, as they go about their lives in this subculture. They drink and spin gauzy yarns, fight like demented puppies and roll each other; they drink more, pass out and sleep where they land. And then they help each other up ahead of police morning sweeps to start anew with a sip of coffee and ‘squeeze’ (Sterno strained through cloth).

Every day.

At the same time, most of them work, according to Ray in an interview included in the ‘making of’ documentary The Perfect Team.

‘Ninety-five percent of the men down there work every day. That is true,’ Ray told an interviewer on the NBC Tonight Show in March 1956 after the film came out. ‘But in that case there you see men that are like a Saturday night in any other saloon, except moreso.’

‘“Except moreso,” as you put it,’ the interviewer says.

One such ‘Saturday night’ is the centerpiece of the movie. A large group of men and several women sit around tables in a Bowery saloon drinking fortified wine by the glass and getting louder, more physically and verbally herky-jerky, and aggressive.

The most striking detail is the montage of faces, like a quick succession of sketches by a master such as Honoré Daumier. Vertiginous cutting makes the room start to spin. Ray and some of the others start to spin out of control. And before long it is morning again on the Bowery.

Sometimes the men go to one of the Christian missions. They get cleaned up and dry out for a spell, but generally they fall back into the old pattern.

The Reverend George L. Bolton, ‘supervisor’ of the Christian Herald’s Bowery Mission, who said that he had served this community for 28 years, addressed an evening religious service that Ray (and Rogosin and his cameraman) attended.

‘I don’t believe that ever a man, whether he be on skid row or otherwise, started out with a life ambition to end up in a drunkard’s grave. And yet that might happen to some person here this very day,’ Bolton said.

This may come across as self-righteous, pompous and smug but combined with a montage of the faces of individual men in the pews, it would come closest to the tragedy and waste Rogosin is trying to put his finger on.

The viewer finds out in the ‘making of’ film that Doc Gorman, warned to stop drinking because of his severely advanced liver disease, did not drink for the duration of the shoot. He died shortly afterward when he started to drink again. Kerouacian Ray, pursued with offers to take up an acting career, disappeared into the dark beyond of the Great American Night.

In addition to Rogosin’s documentary and his son’s 45-minute ‘making of’ film, the Milestone DVD set includes William Futter’s two-minute Street of Forgotten Men (1933) and Bowery Men’s Shelter (1972), an eleven-minute documentary by Rhoden Streeter and Tony Ganz.  

A lot of bull

Il momento della verità (The Moment of Truth) 1965 Italy Criterion (107 minutes) co-production, direction, story and screenplay by Francesco Rosi, cinematography by Gianni di Venanzo and Pasquale de Santis.

This is a great movie about bullfighting that captures both the essence of the sport and a moment in history with remarkable clarity.

It is a great bullfighting movie because the fights are real, including those featuring the film’s bullfighter protagonist, nonprofessional actor Miguel Mateo ‘Miguelín,’ and they are shot like sporting events.

The 300mm lens that director Francesco Rosi’s cameramen used to shoot the fights is the same type lens used to film football matches. It puts a viewer in the midst of action on the field, here in the ring. This works the better yet when the people doing the shooting are skilled and resourceful movie cinematographers and the film stock is Technicolor (this was Rosi’s first color film).

The historical moment is the high water mark of Generalissimo Francisco Franco’s dictatorship, with changes slowly taking shape that eventually would catapult Spain from its nineteenth century stasis into modern integrated post cold war Europe. 

The film won praise in Spain and abroad when it came out. Among ‘revisionist’ dismissals of the film since that time is that it shows Spain and bullfighting through the eyes of a ‘tourist.’ It was dubbed in Italian rather than presented with the richness of the original varieties of regional Spanish the cast of non-professional actors spoke. And bullfighting itself now is leagues beyond the pale of acceptable activities.

But the bullfighting is real; there is a lot of blood, and the crowds look and sound as local as they would at any mid-season baseball game at Boston’s Fenway Park.

The best word to describe this movie may be serendipity.

Rosi took small crew to Spain in the mid-1960s with an idea about filming the famous bull run at the annual San Fermín Festival in Pamplona.

In a 2004 interview, the director said that he had asked himself at the time: ‘If [Ernest] Hemingway, who did not know anything about Spain, could go there and write a wonderful book about bullfighting [Death in the Afternoon], and do it very competently, then why shouldn’t I be able to go there and understand something about it?’

At the San Fermín Festival, Rosi found among the ‘runners’ Miguel Mateo ‘Miguelín’, a photogenic young man with dreams of becoming a bullfighter.

The story that took shape was about Miguel Romero ‘Miguelín,’ a farm boy from Jaén in Andalusia who went to Barcelona to seek his fortune, took up bullfighting and made it to the big time. The crew spent an entire bullfighting season following Miguelín as he rose from a nobody in the amateur circuit to a professional. The narrative traces the outlines of classic American boxing pictures, with the attendant pitfalls.

There is not much work for nor interest in another unskilled laborer from ‘the south’ in sun-bleached, dun Barcelona, which even in color in the mid-1960s looks like a threadbare Italian neorealist postwar city.

But Miguel finds a ‘Maestro’ in the gruff Pedro Basauri ‘Pedrucho.’ Pedrucho is like a Spanish Burgess Meredith, except that he is the genuine article: an ex-pug bullfighter who teaches young men and boys how to fight bulls in his ‘school’ in the basement of a bar.

‘Do you know what the bull is?’ Pedrucho asks his boys. ‘The bull is sacred. Bullfighting is for real men. Not everyone can do it. It requires extraordinary sacrifice. You must hold the bull at all times in your head and in your heart.’

‘You have to get close to the bull, lie on him, keep the muleta [red apron] down and your right hand on your chest… All of you remember this,’ Pedrucho tells them, and when one strikes the bull with the kill shot, the sword through the shoulders to his heart, ‘questo è il momento della verità’—this is the moment of truth.

Miguelín works his way up the food chain of fight promoters and agents, from Don Ernesto and promoter Don Moises, a tailor and seller of fine equestrian and torero apparel, to ‘Impresario’ José Gomez Sevillano, the bullfighter agent Don José. 

In addition to Pedrucho, the bullfighters, fight promoters and agents all appear ‘as themselves.’ After Miguelín makes the big time, he meets members of the titled aristocracy and the nouveau rich connected to the Generalissimo; an American actress—Linda Christian, the only professional actor in the movie—seduces the young phenom.

All along, the bullfighting, filmed to capture the dynamic between bull and man which for so long has riveted the sport’s aficionados, is fascinating to watch.

The remarkable things are that this small Italian film crew managed in the first place to persuade Franco’s Spain to let them shoot the film, and the documentary style in which they went about recording what they saw.

Rosi films an elaborate religious procession during Holy Week in Seville. A magnificent catafalque emerges from a great cathedral, propelled slowly by unseen tens of men beneath it. Alongside this ark follow members of various religious brotherhoods masked in blue, black and purple capirotes, or hoods with high points that hark back to the time of the Inquisition, and a military band and goose-stepping soldiers in German helmets with Spanish fascist emblems.

Rosi also shows the labor-intensive rural Spain that Miguelín leaves. We see a large grain farm in 1960s Europe without a tractor or any mechanized equipment, peasants threshing and winnowing massive piles of grain on the ground. The young men Miguelín meets struggling for work in Barcelona are like him, internal migrants from the impoverished south. After Miguelín makes good, he buys his parents a house in which his mother gets her first telephone.

Big professional bullfights in cities like Madrid and Barcelona take place in large corridas, but amateur events in dusty rural towns are set in town squares within an impromptu ring of wooden-wheeled carts and hayricks faced with boards.

Along with the bullfighting and Miguelín’s compelling story, the fascinating thing about this picture is its indelible Technicolor images of Spain of the time. 

Mamma cinema

Bellissima 1951 Italy (114 minutes) directed by Luchino Visconti; screenplay by Suso Cecchi D’Amico, Francesco Rosi and Visconti; story by Cesare Zavattini.

A working class Roman screen mother is among hundreds who drag their daughters to a casting call for young girls at Cinecittà, Italy’s Hollywood.

This classic of Italian neorealism contrasts the hardscrabble existence of the post-World War II star-struck Roman working class with the predatorial, cynical and self-conscious phoniness of the film industry, Italian style.

Anna Magnani brings to the role of the mother, Maddelena Cecconi, an enormous personality and emotional intensity, a dominating screen presence, and an insatiable desire for her daughter Maria (the five-year-old Tina Apicella in her only film) to have all the things Maddelena wanted for herself but thought she never could have.

In one sense, this tale is a farce: an intense screen mother ludicrously loads her passionate hopes, ambitions, daydreams and frustrations on the shoulders of a tiny child barely aware of her own selfhood.

The movie industry knows this. It also knows that its next box office idol is among this running, pushing, screaming, crying, fiercely competitive and anxious mass of screen mothers and their precious prodigies. 

The neorealist component is that this is a story about the individual personalities this cast of actors brings to life in these circumstances, not just facile stereotypes to laugh at. How these characters grow and change makes for a drama more interesting to watch than the story itself. The cinematography is breathtaking.

The narrative opens at a radio broadcast studio with a full orchestra and chorus performing Gaetano Donizetti’s Quanto è bella, quanto è cara (How beautiful she is) from his comic opera L'elisir d'amore (The Elixir of Love).

A radio announcer reports that Stella Film in Cinecittà is sponsoring un grande concurso for girls 6-8 years old, seeking una graziosa bambina Italiana—a talent contest to find its next child star. This announcement unleashes a torrent of screen mothers and their daughters through half-constructed monumental outdoor sets on the Cinecittà lot to the soundstage where girls will be selected for screen tests.

The surge of humanity disgorges a woman in a dark suit (Magnani) gesturing passionately to an official-looking middle aged man that she has lost her daughter: she cannot find her daughter and they cannot start without her. Magnani’s Maddelena draws the camera like a magnet. She also attracts studiohand Alberto Annovazzi (Walter Chiari). 

Maddelena and Annovazzi find the small child (Apicella), frightened by the ravenous mass of women, playing by herself near a pool. They rush her to the soundstage where a film director (Alessandro Blasetti, playing himself) and his production team are casting a girl for the film Oggi-domani-mai (Today-Tomorrow-Never).

Maddelena pushes her way to the front, carrying the child to the stage; her eyes shine with pride and her heart beats with the child’s every word reciting a poem little Maria learned by heart. Blinded by her love and high hopes for the girl, Maddelena pleads histrionically with the director and his staff.

The director gently points out that the girl looks young for the role, reminding Maddelena that he needs girls between the ages of six and eight. She insists that the girl is seven (Apicella is a small five-year-old). The director invites Maria for a screen test, the first ‘yes’ in what seems certain to be Maddelena’s ‘death of a thousand yeses.’

This ‘opportunity’ only fuels Maddelena’s imagination. She gathers from other mothers that she needs to bring photographs of the girl next time. She can see that the other older girls sing and act better, can dance, and are specially dressed.

Maddelena and her husband Spartaco (Gastone Renzelli) live with their daughter on a sub-street floor of a tenement in Rome’s Prenestino neighborhood. American movies and live entertainment shows are given in the large inner courtyard of the surrounding buildings.

Spartaco is absorbed by the small house or apartment they have been saving up to move to. He has a regular job and spends a lot of time with his friends; it seems clear that he ‘picks his battles’ with his wife. He becomes concerned when Maria starts to seem unusually tired all the time. Spartaco’s family evidently think Maddelena is a bit touched.

Maddelena makes a living giving injections to diabetics. This gives her the income to engineer her daughter’s movie career.

She has a professional photographer take the girl’s picture and hires ‘La Actrice’ Tilde Spernanzoni (Tecla Scarano), a self-important, threadbare old fool who hangs around their tenement, to give Maria ‘acting lessons.’ She commissions a tutu from a dressmaker and tries to enroll the child in a dance class with another self-important, pompous older woman with a foreign accent. Maddelena later leaves Maria at a hairdresser’s salon with La Actrice with a disastrous (but cute) result.

Maddelena tries to use the ‘friendly’ studiohand Annovazzi to work an ‘inside connection.’ Annovazzi, a member of Blasetti’s entourage, gives her a wised-up spiel about ‘recommendations.’ Maddelena can consider her daughter as good as already cast, but 50,000 lire distributed by him as ‘favors’ to the right people would seal it. A little up-front money is not much to ask, with the prospect of a million-lire film contract.

(The rate of exchange at that time was 625 L to the dollar, so this would have been $80 then. The fantastic-sounding sum of one million lire would have been $1600 in postwar dollars.)

Fifty-thousand lire happens to be what Spartaco and Maddelena have saved up for the new house. Maddelena’s romanesca gut tells her that Annovazzi is a liar, but her hungry heart wants to believe. A disaster seems unavoidable.

As Blasetti says to an associate in the midst of the operatic dénouement, ‘You see, Antonelli. This is cinema. We’re responsible for all this.’

But character will out. There is a double surprise ending—and a sweet finish for film buffs. Talking quietly in their apartment at the very end of the film, Maddelena notices Burt Lancaster’s voice in a movie playing in the courtyard.

Four years later, Magnani co-starred with Lancaster in the film version of Tennessee Williams’ The Rose Tattoo (1955), her first English-speaking role in a Hollywood film and the one for which she received an Academy Award for Best Actress.

The cougar loves emeralds

Topkapi 1964 U.S. (120 minutes) directed and produced by Jules Dassin; screenplay by Monja Danischewsky based on Eric Ambler’s novel The Light of Day; music by Manos Hatzidakis.

Topkapi is a fun classic caper story with comic inflections done in the jet-set style of the 1960s, with a great heist sequence and tones and bright colors that since have become hallmarks of camp.

The story is a light and lively reworking of popular thriller writer Eric Ambler’s novel The Light of Day. Ambler’s narrator is Arthur Abdel Simpson, the Cairo-born son of a non-commissioned British Army officer, a middle-aged loser living by his small-minded, little-Greene-man wits in Athens. Walter Harper, an English-speaking ‘German’ bad guy (this was less than twenty years after the end of the war) hires Simpson to drive a new Lincoln Continental automobile from Athens to İstanbul.

The money is good. Unfortunately for the hapless Simpson, his expired passport prompts Turkish authorities at the border to take a closer look at the Lincoln. This leads to Simpson becoming the Turkish military’s ‘agent’ inside the plot.

Ambler draws readers into his story as he winds the unknowing Simpson closer and closer to a scheme that is not revealed until its execution. He keeps readers guessing as Simpson—and Turkish military officials concerned about a ‘political act’ such as assassination—try to figure out what Harper and his associates are up to.

In Jules Dassin’s movie, the narrative voice shifts to the criminal mastermind behind the plot, Elizabeth Lipp (Melina Mercouri). The stylishly coutoured Miss Lipp cuts to the chase when she introduces the story by telling the audience that she loves emeralds; a dagger on display in the Topkapı Palace treasury in İstanbul has four enormously valuable emeralds on it and she plans to have it. The tone lightens considerably from the novel.

Lipp and her partner Harper (Maximilian Schell), a James Bondesque debonair freelance intelligence operative, assemble a team of ‘amateurs’ to do this heist—‘amateurs’ mainly in the sense that these skilled specialists are unknown to police.

Cedric Page (Robert Morley) is the technical wizard. Hans Fischer (Jess Hahn, an American expatriate often cast as an American heavy in French films) provides the muscle. Guilio the Human Fly (Gilles Ségal) is a mute acrobat. Josef (Joseph Dassin, the director’s brother), is the team’s local man on the ground.

Arthur Simon Simpson (Peter Ustinov), with a new middle name, is the stooge hired at first only to drive the gleaming Lincoln from the northeastern Greek port Kavala to İstanbul. One of Simpson’s quirks is a fear of heights. Dassin plays this anxiety to titillating effect when Simpson must take over for an injured Fischer on Topkapı’s rooftops.

This motley crew, led by the emerald-loving cougar Lipp, makes for a chummier gang than Ambler’s cabal of ruthless German/Swiss German jewel thieves. In a similar manner, the portrayal of Major Ali Tufan (Ege Ernart) and the movie’s Turkish military authorities and operatives tends toward a humorous Eastern bureaucratic stereotype neither entirely serious nor condescending.

In a sequence worthy of a silent film, a critical message works its way up the Turkish chain of command, beginning with a navy blue jacket cuff with one gold band picking up a telephone receiver. Cut to a cuff with two gold bands picking up a receiver, then three gold bands, then four gold bands. The camera briefly tracks along telephone lines outside to Major Tufan’s ringing desk phone. 

Akim Tamiroff lends to the comedy as Gerven, the gang’s grouchy alcoholic local cook. Jules Dassin himself appears briefly in an uncredited role as a stickling Turkish policeman at the İstanbul Hilton.

Although Bruce Geller, creator of the original Mission: Impossible television series, reportedly drew his inspiration for Mr. Phelps and his highly technical proficient associates from this film, this caper’s ‘tech’ is decidedly low with the eccentric, baby-blue-eyed, bushy-browed comedian Uncle Bob Morley in charge.

In both book and film, the emphasis is on chance and the human element. The devil is in the details.

The heist scene is a deft mainstream Technicolor reprise of Dassin’s famous thirty-minute, black-and-white silent sequence (the alarm in that story’s jewelry store was sound sensitive) in his classic French heist movie Rififi (1955).

The shots of tourist İstanbul—panoramic views of the city, the Bosporus and the Sea of Marmara, Topkapı grounds, Sultan Ahmet [Blue] Mosque, Hagia Sofia, and so forth—are as picture-postcard lovely as the views of contemporary street life. The second unit shots put the viewer on the street by picking out individuals among passersby; we see the old-time hamals, hawkers and donkeys, and a rich contrast between billboards advertising modern goods and services and antique streets and wood-clad neighborhoods.

To elude police, the gang attends a traditional ermeydanı (heavyweight) oil wrestling tournament in which male contestants wrestle slathered in olive oil. This unusual event is done in nearly documentary style, but Dassin may have taken liberties putting it in Istanbul. According to Fodor’s, there is an annual tournament of yaglı güres—oil wrestling—in late June or July, at Kirkpinar in Edirne, where it has been held since 1362, the long ongoing sporting event in the world.

Manos Hatzidakis’ soundtrack uses the kind of Greekified Turkish folk music called ‘éntekhno’ which he and composer Mikis Theodorakis (Zorba the Greek 1964) made popular in movies of that era set in this region. Hatzidakis won an Academy Award for Best Original Song for the theme song to Never on Sunday (1960), also directed by Jules Dassin and starring Melina Mercouri.

Ambler’s thriller and Dassin’s comedy caper end in different places, but each in its own way spins a satisfying yarn to its just deserts.