Passages

[flyonthewall2983]

For Sopranos fans: Johnny Cakes

[Tony]

Ann Savage has died.

[HerrSchreck]

In DETOUR the way she says "I don't LIKE you," in the car, and later spits the word "sucker" has been imitated by your's truly a thousand times. She is utterly unbelievable in that role (I can't say I've seen her in anything else, though I'm dying to see her interview in Ulmer: The Man Himself); notwithstanding how you'd like to define her (some kind of low form of Femme Fatale? victim? villain?) in Detour, she's turned in one of the most unbelievably electric female performances I've ever seen. Tom Neal was a pretty explosive guy, and although we can attribute his neutering in the pic to Ulmer's always-intelligent, always-on direction, I can't help but take note of how fully Ann Savage smothers Neal via the sheer force of her personality. She's got him so fully under her thumb it seems to extend beyond the borders of the 1.33 image, like Neal could jump into a souped up Indy 500 prototype, and Ann would still run circles around his mind on his cross country head trip.

[Cash Flagg]

(I can't say I've seen her in anything else, though I'm dying to see her interview in Ulmer: The Man Himself)

I'm not sure if this is the complete interview or just an excerpt, but here is three minutes of her interview from Edgar G. Ulmer - The Man Off-screen. Be forewarned: the clip is taped off of television (literally).

[MichaelB]

And here's a chunk of my recent Sight & Sound interview with Guy Maddin, who directed her in My Winnipeg - as luck would have it, I only had the full transcript on my hard drive, not the heavily truncated version that actually appeared in print:

MB: Now as far as I can make out, this is Ann Savage's first credit in twenty years.

GM: Yeah, and even the twenty years was more of a cameo - it's her first speaking role in fifty-one years.

MB: For Sight & Sound readers, she's most famous for Detour over sixty years ago. How did you end up casting her?

GM: It's kind of funny. I was always a huge fan of Detour, having been in that relationship that Tom Neal and Ann Savage endure in Detour: the movie always spoke directly to my quaking, craven heart. And she was always sort of burnished in my head as the most frightening femme fatale in noir history. And I'd come to know Eddie Muller, a guy who has written a lot on film noir: he wrote a book called 'Dark City Dames' about six femme fatale starlets, including Ann Savage, and apparently Ann Savage's performance actually sent Bette Davis running to hide behind the potted palm when Ann Savage came on stage after the premiere. It's a terrifying performance. And I just thought that I was making a documentary that actually had melodramatic elements - for me, I think melodrama is a really important feature for me. Good melodrama isn't the truth exaggerated, it's the truth uninhibited, and Ann Savage is the only person that I felt could play my mother because she could uninhibit what's going on inside my mother's head and present the truth all the more clearly to the viewers. So I had written an outline for the movie, and I was going to get my mother to play herself, but she's getting kind of old and her vision's going and she gets tired, and so I was talking to Eddie Muller and a friend, Dennis Bartok, and they asked me what I was up to, and I said "I'm making this strange docu-fantasia about Winnipeg, and all I need now... I just wish Ann Savage were around to play my mother!" And Dennis said "Ann's around - she was just at my wedding last week!", and Eddie said "I can give you her phone number!", and so I gave her a call. It took about a month and a half of talking to her at length, furiously, because she's been offered many parts over the years but always by Detour cultists who wanted her to basically be, you know, an ageing femme fatale, or in a parody of Detour, or something like that, you know. And so this is the first substantial role which had nothing to do with Detour that she's been offered - it's a completely different character role, and so she really was thrilled to be approached to do something completely different. I don't know why she stayed out of the movies for so long - I guess she was at that awkward age for so long, but I know she had retired. You can read about it in 'Dark City Dames', it's kind of interesting...

MB: She must be in her eighties now.

GM: Yeah, she's 87. And it was an amazing honour and thrill to have her because she was... you know, I'd be rehearsing her over the phone, I in Winnipeg, she lives right in Hollywood, right in the heart of Hollywood, and she was spitting rivets. I'm reading her lines over the phone, and it was so exciting, and I was just hoping that... it was a long, terrible plane ride from L.A. to Winnipeg, and I hoped it wouldn't kill her, but she was cool, she was ready to go. She stayed up late, drank her martinis, came on set, scared everyone, scared everyone again. You know, pretty much what you'd expect.

[mogwai]

Freddie Hubbard

[flyonthewall2983]

Delaney Bramlett.

[HerrSchreck]

Freddie Hubbard

fF-FU-UCK!

[HerrSchreck]

RE the above discussion of the docu ULMER: The Man Off-Screen... I coincidentally got an email from Kino viz their latest sale, and the film is going for just over 14 bucks from Kino direct.

[jesus the mexican boi]

This was a heartbreaker for me: Donald Westlake

[Perkins Cobb]

Mondo Kim's Video in Manhattan.

Suck it, Mr. Kim (#37).

[HypnoHelioStaticStasis]

I was just there two days after X-Mas, after an out-of-town hiatus. That place was godsend for purchasing and renting great videos, records and even a few books here and there.

Goddamn, NYC really has become the most polished turd on the East Coast. Might as well just pack up and move to Westchester...

[tavernier]

Pat Hingle.

[colinr0380]

Edmund Purdom on 1st January.

His credits seem to follow a classical trajectory of small parts in Hollywood films from the 50s (Julius Caesar, Titanic), a brief attempt at bigger roles in biblical and historical epics like The Egyptian, The King's Thief and The Prodigal, then a return to tiny roles like the British radio announcer in The Diary Of Anne Frank.

Then a move to Italy (after a British detour to act in a Val Guest film and The Yellow Rolls Royce by Anthony Asquith) that took in the peplum genre, a couple of spaghetti westerns, a sex comedy, a Bond-influenced spy film, giallo with Franco Nero in The Fifth Cord, a primitive tribe jungle film (before the cannibal horror element was introduced), a police inspector in a Jess Franco sequel to The Awful Dr Orloff (the Eyes Without A Face influenced film), narrating a few Mondo films (including a couple for Sergio Martino and the unsexy sounding Naked England!), the gloriously goofy Frankenstein's Castle of Freaks with Rossano Brazzi, Ruggero Deodato's take on the Airport films in The Concorde Affair, the scientist-priest(!) who creates the insane regenerating monster and then leaves it up to a ten year old crippled girl to kill it for him in Joe D'Amato's notorious gore film Absurd, "Man in elevator" in Nightmare City, playing Vittorio de Sica (!!) in Sophia Loren: Her Own Story, fantasy in Ator, a WWII lost tribe cannibal film (so it looks as if he bookended while missing the more notorious examples of that genre!), a couple of sci-fi films, a cartoon voice over and Pupi Avati's Knights of the Quest.

If anyone is interested, in that Sophia Loren film Rip Torn plays Carlo Ponti and our favourite wooden actor John Gavin plays the suave and sophisticated Cary Grant! I'm not sure if I should be thankful I've never seen it or be desperately trying to track down a copy!

[Donald Brown]

Stooges guitarist Ron Asheton.

[flyonthewall2983]

I'm not sure if it was pointed out, but Teo Macero died last year, in Feb. His production work on Miles' work in the late 60's and 70's is second in innovation only to George Martin, IMO.

[HerrSchreck]

Stooges guitarist Ron Asheton.

Considering the lives those boys led, and the roll call read out when early-punk/Michican dirtboy rock Taps is played, it's amazing any of those dudes survived. I remember someone saying on Iggy's ep of Behind The Music that the most radical thing Iggy could have done, considering all the shit he did and all the puke and blood and glass and syringes he left in his wake, was Survive. With this line recited over a then-contemporary cut of Mr. Osterberg vaccuming his living room, the effect was perfect.

[skuhn8]

I'm not sure if it was pointed out, but Teo Macero died last year, in Feb. His production work on Miles' work in the late 60's and 70's is second in innovation only to George Martin, IMO.

As well as Monk's Columbia years. My favorite part of the Monk doc Straight No Chaser is watching Monk mumble instructions--utterly incomprehensible--and seeing Teo just go with it. I suspect Miles could be pretty tricky on a bad hair day as well. What a life. NOw there's an autobiography I'd like to read.

[Tribe]

Stooges guitarist Ron Asheton.

Considering the lives those boys led, and the roll call read out when early-punk/Michican dirtboy rock Taps is played, it's amazing any of those dudes survived. I remember someone saying on Iggy's ep of Behind The Music that the most radical thing Iggy could have done, considering all the shit he did and all the puke and blood and glass and syringes he left in his wake, was Survive. With this line recited over a then-contemporary cut of Mr. Osterberg vaccuming his living room, the effect was perfect.

I can imagine one big funeral pyre smack dab in the middle of the ruins of Detroit's Grande Ballroom with "We Will Fall" from the Stooges' first album playing.

[Cash Flagg]

Ray Dennis Steckler. I'm dead!

[Faux Hulot]

I can imagine one big funeral pyre smack dab in the middle of the ruins of Detroit's Grande Ballroom with "We Will Fall" from the Stooges' first album playing.

Having nearly fallen through the Grande's rotting floor, I'm surprised that pyre hasn't already spontaneously ignited itself.

[Barmy]

Claude Berri is mort.

[MichaelB]

Ray Dennis Steckler. I'm dead!

Or you suddenly stopped living and became a crazy mixed-up zombie. The fact that you're still posting round these parts points pretty clearly in that direction.

[colinr0380]

The BBC report on Berri. Apart from the obvious Jean de Florette and Manon des Sources, I would particularly recommend Berri's adaptation of Germinal, which managed to be epically scaled whilst still retaining some of the essential grittiness and despair of the story.

I had not previously noted the number of films he helped to produce, from Tess and La Reine Margot to The Secret of the Grain. Perhaps we should think of him as the Sydney Pollack of France?

In a first for the Guardian blogs there's an interesting article by Xan Brooks on Berri...if you can stomach the awful pun at the end!

Perhaps it is not so surprising though that the paper targeted at similar demographics is best placed to note the influence of Berri's films on British culture and perceptions of France. I certainly do not feel Berri should be considered in the very highest tier of other French directors (Godard, Rohmer, Rivette and so on), but he deserves some recognition for the influence his films have had among a wider 'non-arthouse' audience.

[J Wilson]

Patrick McGoohan.