Reviews

For some reason I thought Tom Stoppard had a hand in it, but I was thinking of Terry Southern. Isn't that interesting? My memories of the film, which was played over and over again on the closed-circuit television network of the USS Forrestal during my 1974 Mediterranean cruise, were two: Richard Burton hoovering booze from the floor of his limo and Walter Matthau approaching Candy for sex in the cockpit of a military transport (this scene was repeated in Private Benjamin with Goldie Hawn). I vaguely remember Candy having sex with her comatose father, the appearance of Ringo Starr, and not much else. It's the kind of episodic story that functioned as porn in the late 60s--writers of porn didn't know how to built to a payoff, so they wrote a sex scene, moved the character to another situation, had another sex scene, and so forth (get a copy of The Devil in Miss Jones to see how it works, or Story of O, or Deep Throat, or anything of that era). Is there anything deeper to be seen in this movie? I really doubt it--it looks like a potboiler by a guy who has some bills. I don't have a clue how he got the stars to appear in it, but I'm sure Peter Sellers had a lot to do with that. And it's a gorgeous enough movie--the star is heartbreakingly beautiful and nubile; the sets are decorated with care. Terry's rep was looming pretty large with his Strangelove credit, too, so pretty much anything he ground out was bound to be printed and filmed. Whenever anyone wants to break out of short stories into novels, I advise them to follow this formula--write a series of related sex scenes. Write one a week for a year. Anyone can crank that much out. After a year, shuffle them and send them to an agent. Wait for the checks to come rolling in. What I don't get is why anyone would write about anything other than sex. It's all we care about as a species--having it, resisting it, trying not to think about it, trying to get it up, trying to keep it down, trying to get other people into bed, trying to get other people out of bed. Everything else is just window dressing. Candy is an important movie because it doesn't pretend anything else is important besides falling between the knees of a beautiful, nubile, not particularly bright young woman.

The trailers for this film showed a lot of stills with flashing swords and dramatic poses. It touted the "electrovision" technique. In retrospect, this probably means they were using videotape or something, but at the time, they made it sound really revolutionary and many people thought the series of stills was actually what the movie would look like (I know I did). At the time, movie tickets were ridiculously inexpensive (still fighting for dominance with free television) and you could see a film for a couple of dollars with your best girl. My mom and dad went to see it. I could hardly wait to hear from them what in God's name Electrovision was. Disappointingly, they didn't know. It looked like any other movie to them. Except that a lot of the actors were not fully costumed. Some were in street clothes. Some were fully costumed, and others were wearing modern shirts with tights and pantaloons--a really odd and off-putting mix, according to them. How old was Hamlet supposed to be? He was away at college, right? Richard Burton was pushing middle age, or dragging it, one or the other. In fact, I've rarely seen a callow, melancholy Dane in the role. Alert to film school grads: consider making Hamlet with kids in the roles. Zefferelli did Romeo and Juliet with teenagers and it was unforgettable. So those are my memories of the movie--I never saw it, never had the urge to, but my parents saw it and that was their response. If you want to see someone do the dog out of Hamlet, get the Olivier version. Jean Simmons as Ophelia. Black and white, complete with the perfect lighting they knew how to use with that incredible medium. If you want to see something really unusual, see Rosencrantz & Guildenstern Are Dead (1990). The only Richard Burton film I can heartily recommend is Candy, also written by Tom Stoppard. There's a great scene (filmed through the floor of a limo) of Sir Richard sucking scotch out of the carpet. The king in his greatest role.

Oh, and Hamlet ends with a swordfight in which Hamlet is skewered like a kabob.

Ellen Page is a major talent. Periodically I would think she was a very young boy, maybe 10, but she was 16, I believe, when the film was made. The DVD contains a conversation between Page and Wilson that is full of insights into their characters. Page is one of those 16-year-olds with the brain of a 40 year old but the perceptions of a young person. She doesn't miss a trick. One of the most disturbing things about the film is the shifting sympathy you feel for the murderous juvenile delinquent and the even more murderous child molesting predator. It is claustrophobicly set in a few rooms of a small house, filmed at a relatively great distance with a shallow depth of field so the characters appear to be in an isolated field of focus between fuzzy foreground and fuzzy background. It makes the action seem dreamlike. It has its funny moments, too. Walking past the paralyzed man trying to crawl down the hall, the young girl casually zaps him with a Taser to make him stop. It's right out of a Bugs Bunny cartoon. I hoped she was castrating the bastard. I was a little disappointed to find out she hadn't. But she had more in store. It's full of levels and depths and things with double meanings. I really enjoyed this film even when it made me cringe--especially when it made me cringe. Keep your eye on Ellen Page--you're going to see a lot of her in the coming years.

I'm sorry to report that I have seen this film several times. When it bombed at the box office, it was repeated nightly for about a month on HBO. And I watched it over and over because television in general is so bad--or was at that time. I no longer watch, so it might be wonderful now--like Samuel L Jackson says about swine, "It might taste like sweet potato pie, but I'll never know because I wouldn't eat the filthy mfer." Let's see. Dudley plays Arthur wandering in the desert, always a few steps behind Moses. It came out right after Life of Bryan, so you can guess where the inspiration for this came from. The few mildly funny bits go on way too long until you just close your eyes and grit your teeth. There's one scene where Arthur and Dom Deluise meet in the desert, both of them dragged out and dessicated, dying of thirst. Then they meet like old acquaintances who didn't really know each other very well, promise to do lunch. It could have been funny.

But the scene that I remember most clearly is a meeting with pharaoh in which pharaoh is a black street kid done up in full King Tut regalia. He must have read the lines straight because at some point before the release, they overdubbed his scene with the Hollywood equivalent of black street lingo voiced by a Jimmy Walker wannabe (Kid Dyno-wannabe). Or it might have been Jimmy Walker--who knows? Who cares. They managed to turn an essentially boring scene into a very racist, very unfunny, very long piece of excrement, one of those legendary things that just won't flush, no matter how many times you try, so you leave it there for someone else to deal with.

Well that's my review. If you rent this movie (DON'T BUY IT, WHATEVER YOU DO!) prepare yourself with a bottle of tequila and a six pack of Corona.

Now that they've remade the Poseiden Adventure, this one is probably high on the list for remakes. Maybe they'll hire a comedy writer this time.