Observer » David Selznick

Kung Fu Catfights-The Bride Returns in Kill Bill: Vol. 2

Andrew Sarris — Mon, 19 Apr 2004 00:00:00 -0400

Quentin Tarantino's Kill Bill: Vol. 2 , from his own screenplay, based on the character of "The Bride" created by Mr. Tarantino and Uma Thurman, can be enjoyed both on its own and as a continuation of Vol. 1 . At the very least, it hangs together better than the three parts of the simultaneously shot Lord of the Rings . But I doubt there will be any Oscar sweeps in Mr. Tarantino's future, despite the performances of Ms. Thurman, David Carradine, Michael Madsen, Daryl Hannah and Michael Parks, which compare favorably with those of The Lord of the Rings ' cast.

Actually, people who stayed away from Vol. 1 because of its genre-dictated violence may find Vol. 2 so much fun that they'll want to catch up on Vol. 1 . Though the two movies were originally shot as one, Vol. 1 is action-driven, while Vol. 2 is more character-driven. The narrative thrust of the first installment focuses on the near-extinction of its heroine, Ms. Thurman's Bride (a.k.a. Black Mamba), in a wedding-rehearsal massacre in a rural El Paso chapel, and the Bride's subsequent quest to exact vengeance on the killers, who happen to be her former criminal associates. By contrast, Kill Bill: Vol. 2 spends time recapitulating and clarifying the back story, which ends up slowing down the film. Yet once the ultimate destination of the narrative is confirmed-and reconfirmed-the essential symmetry of Mr. Tarantino's back-story retreats becomes apparent. For example, the scene in which the Bride confronts her most implacable rival and enemy, Daryl Hannah's eyepatch-wearing Elle Driver (a.k.a. California Mountain Snake): The Bride asks her rival how she lost her eye; Elle responds with a flashback to China, where Shaolin martial-arts master Pai Mei (Gordon Liu) is so enraged by Elle's insolent behavior that he plucks out one of her eyes from its socket and steps on it. Elle's revenge for her unfortunate loss: poisoning Pai Mei's food and killing him. Thus, when the Bride plucks out Elle's other eye and steps on it, it's not only for her own satisfaction, but for Pai Mei. The kung-fu master was also the Bride's instructor and provided her with the one secret that will ensure her ultimate victory over her former lover, Bill-who is, by the way, also the organizer of the Deadly Viper Assassination Squad (DiVAS) and the father of her daughter.

It was the Bride's decision to leave the DiVAS that spurred Bill to kill her at her wedding rehearsal, along with all her newfound friends. Another flashback informs us that the reason she left the DiVAS in the first place was because she didn't want the baby she was carrying-courtesy of Bill-to grow up among the murderers who initiated her into the DiVAS.

The Bride's violent story is that of a woman performing Herculean tasks to make a new beginning for herself and her child. Kill Bill: Vol. 1 and Vol. 2 is altogether a woman-oriented film of the most bizarre variety. Many if not most women moviegoers may not respond to this unusual empowerment of their gender by such violent means. On the other hand, many male moviegoers may be disappointed that Mr. Tarantino didn't seize the opportunity to exploit the sensual physical attributes of such tasty morsels as Ms. Thurman and Ms. Hannah, from Vol. 2 , and Lucy Liu and Vivica A. Fox, from Vol. 1 . Indeed, I'm a little disconcerted that my usual complaint-that American censors pay too much attention to sex and not enough to violence-has been stood on its head by Mr. Tarantino. This is to say that the complete absence of lechery in Mr. Tarantino's gaze not only empowers Ms. Thurman and the other attractive women who are her enemies, but also ennobles her special mission. More than a few critics have noted that David Carradine's Bill, like the many unseen Charlies in the various versions of Charlie's Angels , performs the functions of a pimp; both men supervise the activities of pretty women (as assassins in Bill's case, as detectives in Charlie's), though there is more jiggling titillation with Charlie's Angels than with Bill's Vipers.

Yet, if there is one decisive edge for Kill Bill: Vol. 2 over Vol. 1 , it's in the fleshing out of the male villains, who were seen only fleetingly in Vol. 1 , but who emerge in rich, full-bodied and humorously talkative characterizations in Vol. 2 . Michael Madsen, who was so memorably evil in Mr. Tarantino's debut film, Reservoir Dogs (1992), creates a quirky, self-deprecating but subtly menacing character on a very slow-burning fuse, particularly with the seemingly precise deliberation of his shaggy-dog lines and their delayed laughs. But the great revelation of Vol. 2 is Bill himself, a character incarnated out of many "alien" Asian cultures, but with a gift for the hidden ironies of plain talk. It is, of course, Mr. Tarantino's gift to mold his characters with an affinity for verbosity that reminds me of Sydney Greenstreet in The Maltese Falcon , proclaiming to Humphrey Bogart: "By gad, sir, you are a character! I like talking to a man who likes to talk."

Mr. Tarantino knows enough about old movies to know that the best of them were ultimately richest in talk. Nothing fancy, mind you, and nothing abstract, just the kind of stylish patter that Preston Sturges seemed to find on every street corner, in every town hall, in factories and offices-the bawl and brawl of millions of outsiders distilled into a steady stream of vigorous verbiage. Mr. Tarantino has heard this sound in many old movies, and he has come closer than anyone around today to replicating it on the screen. And Mr. Carradine attains almost tragic stature as he walks deliberately toward what he knows is his certain death, head held high, and one last home-grown aphorism stillborn on his lips.

My Third Man

Carol Reed's The Third Man , from a screenplay by Graham Greene, received its first screening in North America in late 1949 at a Loews Theatre in New Rochelle. I know this because I was there, as a low-paid gofer for the Selznick Releasing Organization. My boss, David O. Selznick (1902-1965), was distributing this Alexander Korda U.K. production in the U.S. and had the sneak preview in New Rochelle follow right after the main feature, Frank Borzage's then-underrated Moonrise (1948). At that time, I was still a floundering student at Columbia College with vague writing ambitions coupled with an obsessive interest in movies.

Mr. Selznick had been driven up to the screening in a limousine with two of his contract players, Louis Jordan and Rhonda Fleming, and the drop-dead gorgeous Mrs. Selznick, better known as Jennifer Jones. I had driven to the screening in my mother's Buick with a huge stack of preview cards for the sneak audience.

In retrospect, the movie was too cynical and sophisticated for the good people of New Rochelle. Anton Karas' zither music elicited endless murmuring and giggling, and at the startling ending, the audience let out whoops and hollers. It was then, and remains to this day, the anti-happy ending of all time. Anyway, after the peasants had dispersed, I ventured to address the king directly (even though he was surrounded by his corporate courtiers telling him that the audience just loved the picture). I had never been introduced to Mr. Selznick at the company offices at 400 Madison Avenue. My less-than-immortal words to him were: "It's a great picture, but, of course, you're going to get it rescored."

I've told this story many times over the years as an example of my bad commercial instincts where movies were concerned. Even so, I still don't like the zither score, and I feel somewhat vindicated to discover that there are now other people who agree with me. Back in 1949, I was completely hooked on the melodious background music of Max Steiner ( Gone With the Wind , The Letter ), Miklós Rózsa ( That Hamilton Woman , The Lost Weekend ), Richard Addinsell ( One Woman's Story ), William Alwyn ( Odd Man Out ) and Frank Skinner ( Back Street ), among many others. By contrast, Mr. Karas' zither compositions struck me as relentlessly tuneless and insistently anti-dramatic. But then the leading character, Joseph Cotton's Holly Martins, was anything but heroic as he bumbled around drunkenly in postwar, Allied-occupied Vienna in the shadow of his more charismatic crooked best friend, Orson Welles' Harry Lime. Much of the time, Martins pathetically pursued Lime's ex-mistress, played with gloomy sobriety by Alida Valli-Selznick's failed experiment to create another Garbo in Alfred Hitchcock's The Paradine Case (1947). Trevor Howard and Bernard Lee as two no-nonsense British authority figures and Wilfrid Hyde-White as a pompous recruiter of guest lecturers took top acting honors with their crisp performances.

The picture has been mislabeled Hitchcockian, though Hitchcock had unkind words for the film's dark-and-stormy-night mise en scène . An opposing view was presented by the redoubtable British (and anti-Hitchcock) film historian, Raymond Durgnat, who opted for Reed and Greene as superior to Hitchcock in their tougher-minded approach to the genre.

I find myself halfway between these two positions, since I have been an admirer of both Reed and Hitchcock in different periods of my critical evolution. Seen today, The Third Man -criticized at the Cannes Film Festival for its lack of idealism-can be appreciated as a prophetic statement on the eventual moral bankruptcy of the one-world euphoria that clouded men's minds immediately after the second "war to end all wars." Still, much of the movie is wickedly funny, and the rest is a tribute to the authenticity of its location shooting.

The Third Man is showing at the Film Forum on April 14 and 15.

Howard Safir Feuds With WCBS News … Intern Calls Howard Stern a ‘Bitch’ … Peter Bogdanovich’s Movie of the Week

NYO Staff — Mon, 15 Dec 1997 00:00:00 -0400

One of the best and still freshest of films noir is 1949's The Third Man [Thursday, Dec. 11, WLNY, 55, 3 A.M.] , a classic example-like Casablanca-of an extraordinarily memorable picture that is not really the personal vision of one artist, but rather an amazingly fortuitous convergence of talents at just the right moment with exactly the correct material, each of them working, both separately and together, at top form. The idea for the movie-an American writer trying to unravel his friend's mysterious death in corrupt post-World War II Vienna, run by all four Allied Forces-came from the brilliant, legendary Hungarian producer (and sometime studio head and director) Alexander Korda. He went took it to one of England's greatest contemporary novelists, Graham Greene, not only a fine prose and dialogue writer but a superb constructionist; Greene did the original screenplay, although the most famous speech in the picture-the one about the cuckoo clock-was actually contributed by one of its stars, Orson Welles. In fact, Welles' role of Harry Lime is one of the briefest leading parts in any movie, yet it dominates the picture and is its most unforgettable aspect. Welles always used to say it was a perfect star part, like the title role in the famous old stage melodrama, Mr. Woo : "Everybody talks about Mr. Woo for close to an hour and finally, at the end of Act 1, the silent figure of Mr. Woo is glimpsed crossing a bridge as the lights fade out, and the audience comes out saying, 'Isn't that guy playing Mr. Woo great?' That's a star part." (It is also the only screen role of Welles' whole career that he did with absolutely no makeup, especially no false nose.) However, director Carol Reed's extremely effective style of shooting and cutting this picture would have been inconceivable prior to director Welles' earlier 40's films, Citizen Kane, The Stranger and The Lady From Shanghai . At the head of a flawless cast of European actors is Welles' own discovery, Joseph Cotten at his most likable, with Alida Valli at her most alluring and Trevor Howard at his most acerbic. The famous theme music, all composed and played on a zither, became an international pop hit. In America, the film was bought for distribution by producer David O. Selznick who, though he'd had nothing to do with its making, slapped his name all over the credits. A year later, Selznick, Korda and Welles were at Cannes, Orson told me, and Korda suddenly said to Selznick: "You know, David, I just hope I don't die before you." Surprised, Selznick asked why. Korda replied: "Because I hate to think of you going to my gravestone, scratching off my name and putting yours on."

-Peter Bogdanovich

Wednesday, Dec. 10

Police Commissioner Howard Safir and his friend Raoul Felder, the celebrity divorce lawyer, are making noises about filing a libel lawsuit against aggressive reporter Marcia Kramer and WCBS-TV.

The Commissioner was enraged by Ms. Kramer's News 2 report in July charging him with spending more than $1,000 in taxpayer money on a sumptuous meal in Little Italy. The Channel 2 story was indeed partially mistaken. Mr. Safir's meal, it turned out, was not taxpayer-funded.…

Weeks after the original piece was broadcast, Ms. Kramer and WCBS did correct the error-but that hasn't appeased the commish.…

"We're mulling things over," Mr. Felder said. "I'm appalled by what happened." …

The fight started when Ms. Kramer spotted a good story on the front page of the July 24 Daily News : The city's top cop was caught dining with around 20 colleagues at Taormina of Mulberry Street. Not only was the restaurant off-limits to cops, the News revealed, but it had long been owned by a reputed Gambino capo. It was also a favorite hangout of John Gotti.…

Ms. Kramer got to work, and her report was ready for the 6 P.M. broadcast. " News 2 has learned that taxpayer dollars paid for Safir's meal," Ms. Kramer said in the report. "He's a big sport. Tipped 50 percent. Your tax dollars at work." …

How did News 2 pull off such a scoop? Easy. A field producer from the station shoved a mike in the face of the manager, a man with faltering English and a heavy Italian accent.…

"Did he pay for everybody last night, or did he just pay for himself?" asked the field producer, off camera.…

"No, no, he pay-a, I think he pay-a, some check for the city, ah, New York. That's, ah, New York City check," the manager stammered.…

That was all Ms. Kramer needed. Moments before air time, a spokesman for Mr. Safir called the station with a denial. But that didn't stop the newscast from going with its saucy report. "You might call this the scene of the crime," said Ms. Kramer in the voice-over as the camera showed the restaurant's facade. "The Police Commissioner chowed down last night, eating a little pasta, a little antipasto, a little fish. Tonight, he's eating lots of crow." …

Facing the camera at the end of the report, Ms. Kramer tacked on Mr. Safir's denial. In the 11 o'clock version of the story, Ms. Kramer played down the angle that the meal was paid for by taxpayers. (A private group called New York's Finest Foundation actually footed the bill.) …

Mr. Felder complained on Mr. Safir's behalf the next day. Ms. Kramer delivered her correction on Aug. 6: "The Commissioner was hopping mad at the story," the reporter said, "and he had a right to be." A nice start, but her correction ended up heaping blame on the stammering source. "It seems the manager of the restaurant in Little Italy got it wrong," Ms. Kramer said.…

Mr. Safir was not satisfied with that.…

Asked if he would file suit, Mr. Felder turned suddenly oracular. "It's like wine," he told NYTV. "Eventually, you have to open the bottle, or get rid of it." A spokesman for Channel 2 news had no comment at Observer press time.… [WCBS, 2, 6 P.M., 11 P.M.]

Monday, Dec. 15

You won't see the naked Howard Stern intern in any reruns of The Howard Stern Show on the E! channel. Why? Because Mr. Stern is a wuss, claims Zach Waldman …

Mr. Waldman is the intern who, with Mr. Stern's encouragement, let it all hang out one morning for the cameras. "In my opinion," said Mr. Waldman, "Howard doesn't want a bunch of yes men around him, but that's what he has. He told Roseanne on the air that he thought what I did was great and that I was their favorite intern, but that they had to make an example out of me and fire me. But when did the king of all media become management's little bitch?" …

On tonight's edition, a beautiful mismatch: Fiona Apple takes Howard seriously. [E!, 24, 11 P.M., 11:30 P.M.]

-By Deirdre Dolan and Greg Sargent