One of the many nice things about the new Blu-ray disc of the restoration of Martin Scorsese’s Taxi Driver is that the supplements restore to us the very first audio commentary on the film, featuring the film’s screenwriter Paul Schrader as well as its director. Recorded in 1986 for the Criterion Collection laser disc of the film, it’s a commentary in the Criterion style—serious, frank, in-depth, not the sort of self-congratulatory “I love this shot” stuff that audio commentaries became associated with in the height of the DVD boom. In any event, when Criterion’s license on the film went out, Sony began overseeing the DVD editions, and the exemplary laser disc commentary went by the wayside; somebody at Sony was on the ball enough to acquire the material from Criterion and include it here. It’s still a bracing listen. From the hindsight of ten years past, and having endured any number of personal and artistic crucibles since the making of Taxi Driver, Schrader and Scorsese are in reflective frames of mind, fully cognizant of the fact that Taxi Driver was in a sense an extraordinary occurrence. Scorsese: “It was a beautiful script. There’s only two scripts that I’ve gotten that were completely there, that we hardly had to do any work on…Taxi Driver was the first one, later on it was King of Comedy by Paul Zimmerman[…] Bob and myself felt as if it had been written for us in a funny way.” Schrader: “[It was v]ery much a serendipity. Three people coming together at a certain point in their lives all needing to say the same thing. You know, occasionally in art you get lucky, and you’re in the right place at the right time with the right people.”
It is particularly interesting to listen to them talk about what they were feeling, about what they were doing, in conjunction with exploring what a couple of first-rate critics, Manny Farber and his partner Patricia Patterson, saw them doing in the film. The Farber/Patterson essay, “The Power And The Gory,” was first published in the May/June 1976 issue of Film Comment. (Taxi Driver premiered in February of that year.) It can now be read in the Library of America’s indispensible volume, Farber on Film. An extremely detailed and vivid piece of prose, it alternates so vehemently between admiration for the film and grave offense at it that it can almost be considered as a piece of Writing Against Itself. The arguments against the film are not, as it happens, as easy to dismiss outright as Pauline Kael’s hideously smug and classist “What am I doing here watching these two dumb f–ks?” whinge on Raging Bull. Farber and Patterson characterize as “diversionary” the “pounding, illustrative music that grinds you,” and “the spike words which stud the […] soundtrack.“ ‘Pussy’ and ‘fuck’ have never been harvested so often; the black race is mauled by verbal inventions spoken with elaborate pizzazz styling[…]” The picture winds up Farber and Patterson to the extent that it turns them into “plausibles,” to use Alfred Hitchcock’s coinage for his least favorite kind of movie viewer, and they make a list of “plot impossibles.” They inveigh against the use of the DeNiro: “the intense DeNiro is sold as a misfit psychotic, and, at the same time, a charismatic star who centers every shot[…]” To some, that paradox might seem key to the film’s glory, but Farber and Patterson are clearly quite irritated by this. They cannot, however, disguise their delight at the bravura filmmaking: “The amount of twisting questions that are thrown at the spectator highlights its director’s boldness in intricate visuals.” Still, one senses that Farber and Patterson can’t enjoy their enjoyment. They deeply distrust the film. A key to reading the essay: they frequently use variations on the verb “sell,” and when they do, that’s a signal that they’re gonna bitch about something. They even take the filmmakers to task on the marketing of the picture: “The movie’s ad campaign (the poster of DeNiro as a looming presence, the interviews with crew members almost before the final mixing, the terrible schlock novel now sold in every supermarket which takes [Arthur] Bremer’s diary and Schrader’s script to an unbelievably trashy depth) is revelatory of what the filmmakers feel it takes to move, score, and hold your territory in a competitive U.S.A. society.”
This contrasts quite a bit to Schrader’s pronouncement (I’m paraphrasing here) that the Taxi Driver script leapt out of him like an animal, or Scorsese’s various proclamations concerning his own identification with Travis Bickle’s sense of isolation and anger. On the commentary track cited above, Scorsese’s remark about feeling the script had been written for him and DeNiro comes after he recounts a clash with studio execs over matching shots in the lunch-with-Betsy scene, recollecting in tranquility that it was a “serious” clash and leaving it to the listener’s imagination just how serious it was, given the personal volatility that was much more a part of the Scorsese forefront than it was in 1986, or than it is today.
Almost forty minutes into the film, there’s the shot of Travis on a pay phone after his disastrous porn-theater date with Betsy, hunching over a little, trying to make out what’s gone wrong. The camera slowly tracks to the right, and into a view of an empty hallway leading to the front door of the building. Here’s Scorsese talking about the shot on the commentary, as he looks at it: “We’re holding on him, and he’s just getting refused and rejected and rejected, then the camera starts to move, to the hall. As if it’s about to reveal something. And it doesn’t. The idea is meant that the revelation comes much later, when he explodes. I think this is one of the last things we shot, one of the last days of shooting…and then he enters the frame and leaves. And when I thought of that shot…it presented to me how the style of the picture would be…where the moves would be…the camera moves would seem…uh, if I could really put it in words I wouldn’t have had to put it on film.” At this point Scorsese pauses and seems to gather himself. “The idea is that…theres a sense again of anxiety, a sense of uneasiness, of the camera tracking to an empty hall. Is that his soul?…Is that…the emptiness he’s feeling in his heart? Or are we about to reveal something, is there about to be an explosion, is something terrible about to happen in the hall? It was the idea of keeping the audience off balance all the time, and that was the piece…all the other shots came from that concept that’s in that shot right now. It just turned out to be one of the last shots we took, but it was the first shot I thought of.”
One is reminded of Vladimir Nabokov’s essay “On A Book Entitled Lolita,” and the passage wherein he evokes “Mr. Taxovich, or that class list of Ramsdale School, or Charlotte saying ‘waterproof,’ ” and then pronounces, “These are the nerves of the novel.” Many an English lit major no doubt said “Really? Charlotte saying ‘waterproof’?” and then paged back through the book to find the passage and see if it resonated any differently as a result. It’s worth noting that the shot thus doted on by Scorsese isn’t even mentioned in the Farber/Patterson essay.
I don’t know if Scorsese or Schrader ever went on record with their reaction to the Farber/Patterson essay, but the two were/are admirers of Farber, and I recall one of them describing a visit the two made to Farber’s studio, where they took in his wonderful paintings, as a “pilgrimage.” Also, I wonder what Farber would have made of Scorsese’s recent Shine A Light, which to my mind is, among other things, very much a film about what it takes to move, score, and hold one’s territory in a competitive worldwide market.
Thank you very much for this, Glenn.
Saw this again – for the first time in a theater in years – at a great event at the DGA (nicely moderated by Kent Jones) and I loved it as much as ever. And it was terrific to hear Scorsese and Schrader detail Bresson, “Notes from Underground,” and all the things, including their own dark feelings, that went into this.
It was fascinating, too, to read here Scorsese’s description of that shot in the hallway. Whenever I’ve seen it, it’s always struck me as the camera literally looking away out of embarrassment. Sort of – ohmigod, this poor mook, listen to him get shot down here, I can’t watch this, I just can’t…
In defense of Kael’s reaction to Raging Bull, I’ve always felt the same way. Although I love Scorsese, DeNiro, and most boxing films, there’s some emotional/psychological impasse I can never overcome. There’s no such barrier for the characters in Mean Streets or Taxi Driver. I just don’t feel LaMotta’s pain and become annoyed by all the shouting. Call me a philistine.
@ Michael Adams: I won’t call you a philistine. If that’s your reaction, that’s your reaction, and there’s nothing anyone can do about that. But subjective reactions, while they no doubt spur critical arguments, aren’t critical arguments in and of themselves. Also, Kael’s way of stating her reaction has a not-so-faint-stench of “Not our kind, dear,” snobbery. Maybe that’s just my Italian American heritage taking umbrage.
Glenn, I think that it’s an Italian-American “thing” (part of my own heritage – Abruzzese), but it’s also something else. The idea of leading a life based on suffering, carrying around that kind of guilt – for some people it’s like speaking in tongues. I think that Kael instinctively reacted against it, often violently. You can feel it in her rejections of HIROSHIMA, MON AMOUR, FIVE EASY PIECES, RAGING BULL and – infamously – SHOAH.
In the “Not our kind, dear” department, MS was referred to as “the paisan with his nose pressed up against the window” when he made AGE OF INNOCENCE.
Didn’t Kael also sneeringly dismiss the above shot from Taxi Driver as Scorsese borrowing from Antonioni, or am I misremembering?
I always took the list of “impossibles” to be icing on the cake of the essay’s substantive rags on the movie; the overall push-me-pull-you effect feels like F. and P. each wrote a solo piece and then spliced them together in alternating paragraphs. I just happened to watch the movie again last weekend–and Jesus, what a beautiful thing it is to look at–and for the millionth time I was struck by all the niggling inconsistencies in Travis’ character, some of them written but mostly in the performance. Schrader once described De Niro’s turn as deliberately polyglot–that he decided to make Travis as interesting as he could within each individual scene without worrying about the pieces fitting together. (It bothers me less than the character of Iris, who I’ve never believed for a second, and who–probably not coincidentally–is in all of the scenes that drag for me).
Incidentally, Glenn, I noticed Travis mails the money for Iris to 240 E. 13th Street. Do you know if that’s anywhere close to the actual tenement they used? (I pity the postman whose job it was to locate the unit she lived in; Travis could have helped him out by addressing the letter to “Little Piece of Chicken”.) I heard somewhere, maybe in a commentary, that the building was already condemned when they shot the movie, but when I Googled a street-view of that address, the row of buildings that showed up could very well have been the ones.
Great piece on a great film, Glenn. Thanks.
The youtube of the scene you discuss is here: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=F2WwDCqdT04
Every time I watch the scene I am always taken with the simplicity and audacity of that dolly move.
Ack, I forgot to mention what I set out to post to begin with. About 10 years ago Letterman showed that shot–it was taken in part of the RCA building, I think–and followed it with a then-contemporary shot of the same hallway, all remodeled and spiffed up. I don’t remember why Late Night gave itself such a weird little detour, but it has stuck in my head all these years.
Also: Kael just wrote some crazy shit sometimes. There’s no explaining some of her views.
I have a copy of “The terrible schlock novel” Farber mentions. It’s a quickie paperback tie-in novelization of TAXI DRIVER and for the strangeness factor alone it is far and away the highlight of my tiny rare book collection. The conceit of the book is to do as books do best and to give us access to Travis Bickle’s inner thoughts. I haven’t been able to make it past the first few pages.
Kudos to GK for this. TD was THE FIRST film to make me so uncomfortable, mostly for the whole porn date sequence and also for the openly frank way that Travis talks to Jodie Foster, among other things. I was just a kid and it freaked me out and yet it was a film I was drawn to over and over again. Day One purchase for me.
Yes, Kael didn’t much care for the shot of the camera looking away from Travis. She thought it was an Antonioni touch. I love the shot, but freely admit it is the one shot in the entire film that explicitly calls attention to itself.
Kael also wasn’t a fan of the score. She felt it played off the film noir tropes of the story. It is interesting to consider how the movie would play if Scorsese had used only source music. The Jackson Browne song is so starling that the movie momentarily enters some kind of dangerous pop nightmare.
Michael: if you are a philistine, then so am I. The problem for me with RAGING BULL (and some other Scorsese films) is the creepy sense of admiration I feel he has for his het male characters even when they are at their most monstrous. As a queer spectator, I find it difficult to negotiate the inordinate sympathy Scorsese shows toward them. He successfully limns how the systems they create eventually rebound upon and cannibalize them, but he presents these events as possessed of a tragic dimension which they utterly lack in my eyes (I think Scorsese inherits this understanding from Kazan in whose films it can also be found). CASINO is one exception for me, where I feel he distances himself more from his characters and does not engage in any special pleading. Scorsese seems to channel Mankiewicz more than Kazan in his filmmaking here, and JLM’s more distancing approach allows space for a queer viewer to enjoy the show without having to fend off continual entreaties to identify.
TAXI Driver is also enjoyable since Scorsese deconstructs the social matrix of male heterosexuality: I had never heard what Tom posted regarding how De Niro approached the role, but it makes sense. Travis is composed of the shards of maleness with the glue no longer working: there is a certain glee in watching him fall apart – the quintessential gay basher committing seppuku with his own fragments.
As for the corridor scene, when I saw TAXI DRIVER at Film Forum recently, I thought of the corridor in EAST OF EDEN Scorsese talks about in his and Kent’s Kazan documentary. It is as if the camera were suddenly bored with Travis’ self-pity and lack of self-awareness, and was pro-actively moving to its next position to hurry things along, beckoning Travis to end the call since his cause was hopeless.
Kent: as always you clarify things for me. Having accepted at a tender age my desire for sex with my own kind and determining not to feel guilty about it, the idea of living a life saturated with suffering and guilt is alien to me. Glitter and be gay, I say, and those who wish to contemplate sin, please do so in the most fabulous hair shirt possible (made from all natural fibers if at all possible!). I always want to like a Scorsese picture, but he sometimes makes it difficult for those not on his wavelength to do so.
@ Brian and Michael, I think: I don’t think the “problem” with RAGING BULL, such as it is, is glorification. Rather, it’s the opposite. The annoying thing about Kael, as usual, is more her tone than what she’s saying, because what she’s saying isn’t entirely wrong. LaMotta is consistently presented as a mean, stupid, charmless man, and for the first 90 minutes of the movie, Scorsese makes no attempt to tone that down, justify it, or even to offer a second of real human connection between LaMotta and anyone to givethe viewer a way in. Don’t get me wrong—I love RAGING BULL, and watch it frequently, and I think the jail cell scene and its aftermath is all the humanizing you need—but I can definitely understand how someone who wants to watch movies about admirable, heroic, or at least interesting characters might find BULL’s learning-averse, ugly, mean, unfunny protagonist to be someone you just don’t wanna spend a couple hours with.
This is actually an instructive contrast to TAXI DRIVER, which is made chilling in part because Travis is a genuinely charismatic, likable fella. If Bickle was presented as an actual disconnected schizophrenic, Betsy would seem like a fool for hanging out with him. But Travis is a soft-spoken, good-looking guy, and a seemingly attentive listener besides (certainly more so than her way less sexy co-worker), which makes her sense of betrayal at the porn theater understandable, rather than idiotic. Perhaps this is more of DeNiro’s fragmented persona—the Travis we see in those early diner scenes is a more presentable Billy Jack, a boy you’d be proud to bring home to mother. Consequently, Betsy seems like a smart woman making a mistake (and getting out the instant she realizes it), as opposed to Vicki, who’s a dim-bulb too young to know better.
Brilliant filmmaking aside, I’m of the notion that Scorcese admires these louts, deifying their physical power and bullying. At least with Jake La Motta, there’s a real person under scrutiny or examination; in CASINO (and even GOODFELLAS), I have no idea why I should care about any of these venal characters. It’s a recurring theme in modern art, that “dark” has so much more depth than “light.”
John Carpenter slags on TAXI DRIVER in his Cinefantastique interview from 1980: “Depth? What depth?”
You just brought back vivid memories of Summer 1995, when I hauled home a lightly used Pioneer laserdisc player and a stack of CLV Criterions from an estate sale in the hoity-toity part of town. Along with a near mint Taxi Driver there was, among a host of others: Rebecca, Magnificent Ambersons, Blade Runner, Breaking the Waves, King Kong, Singin’ in the Rain, Ghostbusters, Boyz N the Hood, Forbidden Planet, Raging Bull and two copies of 2001.
The former owner was obviously a late adopter of the technology. Aliens and the lavishly packaged Original Star Wars Trilogy were the only CAV discs I could dredge up from crates and crates of mainstream garbage (like a shameless, piss poor fullscreen VHS-quality version of Road Warrior) and Disney stuff.
Long story short it’s a decade and a half later, the motor on my turntable broke, my bulky LD player is home to a colony of spiders, and I still haven’t bothered to make the hi-def plunge yet.
Does anyone know where I can get this brick fixed?
Excellent piece as always, Glenn! I would love to see a theatrical print show up in my neck of the woods, but that’s highly unlikely. I will happily settle for the new blu-ray and the Criterion commentary track!
FB: the problem with the “humanizing” in RAGING BULL is that it does not take for me. When LaMotta cries out: “I am not an animal,” I feel like doing a call-and-response and telling the screen: “Oh, yes you are.” LaMotta is presented as possessing all the traits and constructs of a violent, heterosexual male. While Travis’ coming apart has a element of the comedic, Scorsese presents LaMotta as a tragic hero/victim. The problem with this approach is that LaMotta’s pathology becomes his tragic flaw which doesn’t work (THE AVIATOR has a similar problem in its construction). What is great for me about CASINO is that Scorsese scrutinizes the pathologies on display without ever trying to elevate them to the level of the tragic.
John Carpenter has slagged lots of major movies, ‘2001: A Space Odyssey’ included. At least when he gave that Cinefantastique interview he was still capable of making a few himself.
Travis Bickle is not the most charismatic character in the film. That honor goes to Sport the pimp. Kael was right when she described him as funny and likable.
Scorsese seems to admire any character who is ture to his or her nature. We like Henry Hill because he wants what most of us want. He wants a life of comfort. The only problem is that he has to break the law for that comfort. He knoww this. We know this. Scorsese knows this. We’re all on the same page. And there’s a price to pay for that level of comfort. Scorsese knows this, too.
The idstancing one feels in CASINO is what makes it an underrated masterpiece. Unlike GOODFELLAS, which ends on a coke high, CASINO is a slow decline into regret, murder, and madness.
Scorsese rarely judges his characters, but he will judge their actions.
@Brian- I think just because Scorsese may try to elevate LaMotta’s pathologies to the level of tragedy does not mean he is not scrutinizing them. I agree that Scorsese clearly does have empathy for LaMotta(not to bring up the empathy issue again) but I feel he is very clear eyed about the fact that LaMotta brings his ultimate downfall upon himself. One could argue that perhaps a more detached approach may have illustrated that point more clearly, IMO the film woudn’t be as powerful but that’s another issue, but it seems obvious to me that Scorsese is scrutinizing LaMotta.
I forgot to post this in my last post, but Rosenbaum seems to have a a view of TAXI DRIVER that is similar to Farber’s and Patterson’s. He starts his review of the 96 re-release with: “Perhaps the most formally ravishing — as well as the most morally and ideologically problematic — film ever directed by Martin Scorsese, the 1976 Taxi Driver remains a disturbing landmark for the kind of voluptuous doublethink it helped ratify and extend in American movies.” I am personally a big fan of TAXI DRIVER, but this piece gave me a lot to chew on when I first read it. I would love to read the Farber/Patterson piece, this is now another reason I need to buy Farber on Film.
Dan, I believe the phrase in question is “an Antonioni pirouette.” Back in those days, citing “influences” and “homages” was pervasive. Sarris detected “mists of Murnau” in the opening shot. Manny and Patricia reckoned that MS had “ravish[ed] the auteur box” with references to/steals from FRENZY, WAVELENGTH, Godard, Peter Emmanuel Goldmann, etc. The great unasked question, though, was what place these gestures had in the story.
You should hear John Carpenter on the subject of John Ford in general and THE SEARCHERS in particular.
Brian, on the subject of MS, EAST OF EDEN and hallways, take a look at the scene where De Niro is kicked out of the club in NEW YORK, NEW YORK.
This question of venerating and glorifying and romanticizing people is intriguing because it comes up so frequently, particularly in relation to the Coen Brothers. I find it more and more mystifying as I get older. I can certainly understand having a negative reaction to certain lifestyles or types of behavior. On the other hand, I don’t think those reactions have any place in criticism.
Is Jake La Motta “tragic?” Hmm… Maybe it’s more useful to look at the film from the other end of the telescope. Personally, I think that everything and everyone under the sun is worthy of being described and portrayed in art. I see no special value in making movies about people who veer toward the light as opposed to the darkness – in fact, aren’t most people who live in the shadows where they are because of luck and circumstance? And, if you’re going to make a movie about something – anything – if certainly follows that you have to have some kind of affinity for whatever you’re filming. MS has made quite a few movies about people who are raised to believe that suffering and life are one in the same, or who see no alternative but to live as venally as the people in GOODFELLAS or CASINO (both of which are also based on 100% real people, Christian – in fact, there’s probably more license taken with La Motta than there is with the people in the Pileggi books). Such lives exist, such everyday suffering and brutality and venality are everywhere. And if you have affinity for whoever it is you’re filming, you’re obviously going to run the risk of appearing to make a case for their actions. If you’re showing the attraction of violence, you’re running the risk of making it look attractive or “glamorizing” or “valorizing” it, to use two exhausted words. That’s a very fine line to walk, and it’s a very different strategy from the de-mythologizing and de-dramatizing that everyone once thought was the answer to everything. Trying to reduce the movies under discussion here to sublimated admiration seems hopelessly reductive to me – they’re way too complex for that. Romanticization? Try Michael Mann. Does MS make it “difficult” to like some of his movies if you’re not on his wavelength? You bet. I can think of several other great filmmakers who do likewise.
Jason, “The Power and the Gory” is also available in the newer paperback edition of NEGATIVE SPACE.
“Incidentally, Glenn, I noticed Travis mails the money for Iris to 240 E. 13th Street. Do you know if that’s anywhere close to the actual tenement they used?”
Not Glenn, Tom, but the address of the actual exterior is 226 East 13th (you can see the number over the door in the pullback after the shooting – not sure why they put the wrong one on the envelope). And it’s still there, but all the interiors were in a different building uptown that was indeed scheduled to be demolished (which is why they were allowed to cut a giant trough in the floor/ceiling to do the big overhead shot in that same scene). Travis’ apartment was shot in the same now-gone building.
I used to rent laserdisks from a great shop at the corner of 13th and 3rd, and after getting the Criterion TAXI DRIVER disk was much amused to discover you could see the doorway where Sport is shot from inside the store (that door and building have been completely redone, along with the Variety Theater and unpainted furniture shop on 3rd that were still the same in 1990 as when the film was shot).
What with all the Pillorying Of Pauline, perhaps it should be mentioned that her review of “Taxi Driver” is a glowing, adoring rave. She didn’t like the Antonioni thing, or Hermann’s score, but however debatable those points may be, she loved the movie on the whole, praised it to the skies.
As for Kael’s alleged anti-Italian-Americanism – or anti-guilt or whatever – I’m not sure how that jibes with her raves for “Mean Streets” or the first two “Godfather” pictures (“possibly the greatest movies ever made in this country,” she said) or “The Last Temptation of Christ” or her ceaseless admiration for De Palma or her statement (to Roger Ebert, I think) that Catholics were making the best movies (Scorsese, Coppola, De Palma and Altman cited in the mix) due to “the sensual richness of their backgrounds” and other qualities she found admirable.
Lastly, and this is slightly off-topic, but whatever faults she may have found with “Five Easy Pieces,” her calling it “a striking movie…eloquent, important, written and improvised in a clear-hearted American idiom that derives from no other civilization” doesn’t sound like a flat-out rejection to these ears.
If you were to go back and read the major critics of the day (as I often do thanks to my revered shelf of published reviews from the National Society of Film Critics) – you might be surprised at how many 60’s/70’s “classics” were not always regarded as such. Kael could be visionary, as when she noted that THE SUGARLAND EXPRESS was one of the most phenomenal directorial debuts ever, and way way wrong when expressing the notion that Flip Wilson might join the ranks of entertainer pantheon. I love John Simon’s bitchy review of her gushing review of Toback’s FINGERS…
@ Craig Simpson: Rather surprised to see you weighing in here, given your estimation of my person and works. I shall try to contain my emotions.
Just to note, for accuracy’s sake, that I was not accusing Ms. Kael of “anti-Italian-Americanism.” I made a mildly jocular remark about why her much-lauded line concerning “dumb f–ks” in “Raging Bull” got my back up a bit. Kent Jones amplified it with his rather more damning citation concerning the “paisan” crack in her “Age of Innocence” review. I didn’t know Kael, don’t know how she felt overall about Italian-Americans, and am not really all that concerned about it. I was merely talking about her writing, mode of argumentation, and my reaction to it. That is, objectively, or as objectively as I can muster, I believe that the “dumb f–ks” line is snobbish. The “paisan” line is something else again, but again, I’m not all that concerned with it. That is all.
Glenn, sorry if I made things confusing. That wasn’t Kael who made the paisan “observation.” It was Jonathan Rosenbaum.
Christian, what you say is not only true of the 70s but of every era. Confronting something in your own time when it’s brand new is different from looking back at it from a distance.
Craig Simpson, I am eating my words about FIVE EASY PIECES. Must have been dreaming.
Speaking for myself, I don’t want to “pillory” Pauline Kael. Just making an observation. I certainly don’t think she was anti-Italianamerican. Nor is Rosenbaum.
In regards to the ability to relate debate going on above:
I always sort of resent this topic, because it invariably, eventually becomes a platform for narcissism (not that that’s happened yet here), I.E. “I can’t relate to that character because he’s too bad” or it becomes a topic about “humanization”. Frankly, I’ll admit that I absolutely can relate to the characters in Scorsese’s films. It was the initial attraction to them when I was 15 and saw Mean Streets for the first time and could feel what Charlie was going through in dealing with religion and with someone like Johnny Boy, who reminded me of people I knew growing up. I can relate to LaMotta, and to Hill, and even to Bickle and Pupkin (as much as that is hard to admit, especially in the latter case). I don’t see what’s so “unhuman” about self-loathing, greed, isolation, jealousy and the divide between the internal and the external. Quite the opposite, I think.
One of the things that makes Raging Bull, and all of his films, for that matter, so moving to me is because Scorsese doesn’t put any distance between himself and the subject. We feel their lives from the inside out, and his films are always emblematic of the lesson I think every human should live by, which is: Be careful about judging anybody, because you don’t know what’s going on inside of them. There is no question to me that LaMotta is a tragic figure. There is nothing more tragic than the man who can not articulate.
Glenn: Thank you for your explanation. I’m admittedly guilty of cross-referencing your comment here with another that you tweeted (and got retweeted) a while back: http://twitter.com/#!/ExtAngel/status/38416807429672960 If I misread that one too, then I apologize.
Kent: No problem. Thanks for clarifying, though.
One of the many, many reasons I gave up Twitter for Lent, and am likely to use it only for purposes of promotion of my writing if I ever get back on it, is because, despite the fact that I sent out signals such as adopting the handle “ExtAngel” (that’s short for “Exterminating Angel,” folks) and eventually using a PICTURE OF A FUCKING HONEY BADGER AS MY AVATAR, people seemed inclined to take my every utterance there as OFFICIAL PRONOUNCEMENTS OF GLENN KENNY, FILM CRITIC, rather than the deliberately exaggerated peevish expressions they often were. “People don’t ‘get’ you on Twitter,” a friend in the film programming realms observed in one conversation several months back; when I saw him at the screening of “Sailor’s Luck” at MMI this afternoon, he remarked on how my sojourn from Twitter seemed to be doing me some good. and so it has. But thanks a pantload for the stroll down Memory Lane, Craig Simpson, hope I can do you a similar solid some time.
@ Hollis Lime: Yes, exactly. I really envy the people out there who can’t relate in some way to LaMotta. For who among us has not, in some way or another, worked to, as the saying goes “defeat our own purpose?” Maybe one’s own self-destructiveness doesn’t manifest itself in such an, ahem, uncultured way as LaMotta’s but…I don’t know. I don’t see much point in holding my nose and talking about what an “animal” the LaMotta character is. I wrote elsewhere that from “The Big Shave” to “Raging Bull” to “Shutter Island” one of Scorsese’s great themes has been the man who can’t stop beating himself up. The reason it’s a man is because…well, these ARE, all the way to “Shutter Island,” personal films.
The pay-phone shot you referenced is the first shot in TAXI DRIVER that I ever saw – I was in a grad-school film class on alternative poetics, we were studying Ozu, and our instructor used this scene and one from a Woody Allen film to show Ozu’s influence on other filmmakers. The idea being that Scorsese and Allen didn’t feel the need to dwell on the subject in a shot but would move the camera away. In retrospect, I don’t remember how this ties into Ozu’s tatami shots but that was a good, eep, 18 years ago.
The phone/hallway shot always reminded me of the long, slow lateral tracking shot inside the Alexander HOME in A Clockwork Orange…
For what it’s worth, Glenn, I always found your tweets hilarious – and blatantly, as you say, “exaggerated peevish expressions” – and sorely miss seeing them in my twitter feed. So the humor wasn’t lost on all of us, if that makes you feel any better.
Thanks Ryan. I never had to worry about the people upon whom the humor WASN’T lost. But being called “disgraceful” by pious tsk-tskers upon whom said humor WAS lost gets really tiresome really quick. Not to engage in a self-pity party, especially after pillorying poor Pauline Kael, the kindest, warmest, bravest, most wonderful, etcetera, etcetera…
Dear Manchurian Kenny-date:
Don’t fret. Your tweets were hilarious – though perhaps more Burroughs’ exterminator than Bunuel’s.
I still have not recovered from seeing “Taxi Driver” in 1976 (when I was 19). It disturbs me more than any other film I can think of, and it has taken me years to understand why. Most of it has to do with directorial style.
“Raging Bull” feels to me like a cold, intellectual exercise – perhaps because (as I later read) Scorsese felt the same way until he agreed to make the picture. The legend (and I don’t know how true this is) is that Scorsese was hospitalized and De Niro tried brought him the script, trying to persuade him to make the picture. Scorsese’s initial response was, why would I want to make a movie about this animal? But, eventually, he did. Personally, I’ve always felt an unbridgeable distance between the movie and the character – rather than an engaged ambivalence. “Taxi Driver,” on the other hand, hits me in the gut. Can I explain why? Probably, now, if I had thousands of words…
The difficulty of connecting to LaMotta goes deeper, I think, than whether he’s human (of course he is, but that’s worth very little) or whether one can identify with him (I mistrust anyone who says they can’t—there’s few people who’ve never felt the urge to just start hitting everyone who bugs ’em, and BULL’s first apartment scene does a great job of conveying how a tight urban environment pushes that urge). The tough thing about RAGING BULL is that unlike most (American) movie protagonists, LaMotta never seems to want anything very much, and what he does want doesn’t even rise to the level of trivial.
Travis Bickle is crazy, but his desires are, in their own weird and sick way, pure—he wants to do good, but has a completely twisted notion of what that entails. Rupert Pupkin’s dreams are pathetic and selfish, but he is by god pursuing ’em, and movie audiences have proven many times that they enjoy watching someone try to achieve a goal regardless of the value of that goal. But LaMotta… Perhaps he wants love, or respect, or to be taken seriously, but his efforts to achieve that are half-hearted, and he’s easily distracted from them by his own rage. Maybe what makes some people think he really is an animal is that the thing he seems to want most is “a stage where this bull can rage”—nothing makes him as fulfilled as hitting things, preferably soft, breakable things, like people, and by the end of the movie we’re left unsure if his desire to break things has overwhelmed his desire for love, or if the desire for love was always a phony overlay on his deepest wish, which is to cause pain. Bickle and Pupkin and even Rothstein are tragic—they all want something that they can’t have, and their attempts to get it take them farther away from their goal. LaMotta is something else.
I sympathize with—and largely share— Kent Jones’ view that one’s reaction to certain lifestyles has no place in criticism (though I wonder if Jones, or Kenny, would have the same indifference to their own reaction in a movie about, say, a texting-crazy teenage girl who doesn’t commit a single crime). But it’s worth keeping in mind what an exceptional, twentieth-century artifact that view is. From Aristotle to Wilde, it’s been a given in centuries of Western criticism that an protagonist must have some kind of nobility in order to merit our attention. Tragedies of the common man like “Machianal”, “Woyzeck”, or “Death of a Salesman” attacked the view that this nobility had to be one of title, but all those works still featured protagonists with recongnizably decent desires, thwarted by circumstance. LaMotta isn’t thwarted by “luck or circumstance” (or if he is, Scorsese doesn’t show it to us). He’s just a mean, selfish motherfucker; the kindest thing you could say about him is that he’s crazy.
Now to my mind, what makes RAGING BULL such an accomplishment is that it breaks the rules of screenwriting yet manages to be compelling through sheer formal mastery. But I can’t fault anyone for reacting as Kael did—it really is a movie about a bunch of dumb fucks wandering around bumping into things, and pretty much the opposite of what a story is supposed to be. To react with disbelief or condescension to anyone who doesn’t seem the point of spending hours on it is like being goggle-eyed at someone going to church—it’s not very Modern, but lots of people do it because people did it for millennia.
@ Mr. Bastard: That’s funny you should bring up movies about teenage girls, as I’ve actually written a script whose protagonist is a teenage girl! Twelve going on thirteen, to be precise. But there’s no texting in it! Shit, maybe THAT’S why I’m having trouble finding “backing.” Clearly I should have consulted with someone more attuned to the zeitgeist before even contemplating such a project.
I do enjoy how you’re so eager to come down on Kent and myself for thought crimes we haven’t even committed yet. It’s like I’m living in “Minority Report” or something.
On a more “serious” “note” I was gonna say that, agree with its conclusions or not, Robin Wood’s analysis of “Raging Bull” in “Hollywood From Vietnam To Reagan” provides a pretty thorough layout of the film’s thematic richness and radical structure.
TFB’s reflections are really interesting. What does Jake La Motta want? What we all want, without being able to articulate it. Instead, the movie articulates it.
Regarding his reaction to my comment and his notions of what Glenn or I might think of a movie about this or that, one of the things I really dislike about blogs is that people say things that they would never dream of saying in public. You write something and someone responds with the equivalent of: I agree with you but I have my doubts that you really mean it. Kind of a conversation-stopper.
All my life, I’ve heard people say things like “I don’t like country music” or “I don’t like movies about reincarnation” or “I don’t like movies about texting teenage girls.” The minute you utter something like that, you’ve left criticism behind. You’re also restricting yourself. I’ve seen plenty of movies about people whose company I don’t normally seek out that I love – BORN AGAIN, my pal Michael Camerini’s great documentary about born again Christians, or DANCE PARTY USA by Aaron Katz. On a more dramatic level, I walked out of SOUTHLAND TALES the first time I saw it, at the disastrous Cannes press screening. 80s nostalgia, comic books, a shaggy dog narrative pastiche, etc. – I thought it was a waste of time. Then I realized that I’d been thinking about it and I went back to sit through the whole thing the next day. I felt the same lack of connection to the elements, but I found it pretty impressive and sometimes moving.
Hare Krishnas, Goldman Sachs executives, NASCAR, texting teenage girls – it’s not the subject matter, it’s whether or not the movie is GOOD that is the question. And by the way, if you’re lookng for a good texting teenage girl movie, try Lola Doillon’s debut.
Dude, really, no thought crimes are being alleged! I’m just saying that (male) critics and (male) cinephiles often talk as though one’s personal identification with characters should be irrelevant to ability to enjoy a movie, yet it’s patently obvious that (male) critics and (male) cinephiles, however personally gentle, do identify with violent male protagonists in a way they often don’t with female and/or clean-scrubbed protagonists, and this has a visible effect on what movies get into the critical pantheon. It’s not a crime, it’s just worth acknowledging. Christ, the eagerness to take offense!
Kent: So what do you think LaMotta wants that the movie’s articulating? Scorsese makes some lovely lyrical gestures, particularly the first time LaMotta sees Vicki at the pool, but it seems like that’s more a reflection of LaMotta’s passing desire, not a deep superobjectivey want. So what is it?
Or to put it more succinctly: When someone says their ability to identify with or like a protagonist is completely irrelevant to their feelings about a movie, I have the same reaction I do when someone says they can’t at all identify with Jake LaMotta: “Really?” Again, given that identification with a protagonist and perception of the protagonist’s nobility has been a basic element of Western literary criticism since well before the birth of Jesus, it’s a little surprising that people seem to think that it’s an utterly irrelevant relic. Ideally, a work of art can, through aesthetics, help broaden the zone of what you can identify with to include people you never thought to identify with before—that’s a big part of what art *does*, and why even a formally amateurish movie like JUST ANOTHER GIRL ON THE IRT can nonetheless have some potency. But to write it off as a non-issue is to dismiss pretty much everything written about art before about 1870.
I think part of the shift that TFB’s talking about has a lot to do with changing socioeconomic conditions. The concept of a protagonist having nobility might have always been something of a red herring; it makes more sense to me that we identify with the aspects of a character we see in ourselves, good or bad; what’s important is forward motion. Back when rulers ruled by divine consent, it was easy to exalt them and their struggles, nowadays, not so much (although The King’s Speech is evidence that such identification hasn’t gone away completely).
In terms of what makes LaMotta interesting, I’m of two minds about that question. On the one hand, it might just be the case that Scorsese’s formal mastery, combined with De Niro’s natural charisma and presence, makes for a slam-dunk formal coup that dazzles on an almost limbic level. The music, cinematography, the editing – RAGING BULL has always struck me as a close contender for Pure Cinema. On the other hand, I’m not sure if such a thing exists, as attractive a notion as that is, and I’m inclined to believe that what LaMotta wants is tangible and well-articulated, but it isn’t to be loved or to cause pain (although he probably does want those things too); it’s to be free, utterly and crazily free. So give me a stage…etc – he wants a place where he can slough off the layers of civilized behavior and act on pure impulse. To let his id break free and run riot. Of course, attempting to do that always results in suffering, but LaMotta is so relentless in his struggle that he’s impossible not to watch (although I guess not for everyone.) And to make matters more complicated and interesting, he understands on some level that he can’t just be a pure animal – he needs the boxing ring, or later, the stage – some zone set aside to indulge in his baser instincts – except managing those two arenas as if they could ever be mutually exclusive is a fool’s errand, and so he unravels. I can certainly identify with such an impulse; it’s at least one reason I go to the movies, and it makes the “give me a stage” scenes all the more resonant. One person’s degradation is another’s transcendence.
Well, in the sense of seeing some aspect of myself, I do not identify with Travis or Jake in any way or on any level. I’d have an easier time identifying with the characters in Pather Pachali or Life of Oharu. I do feel as though I’ve had visions of and encounters with Travis and Jake in life, on the news, just taking a freaking subway ride. But I am much more of Kent and Glenn’s frame of mind. I’m quite guilty of staying in my comfort zone but when I stray outside for movies about people I don’t like, or don’t want to know, or whom I wish didn’t exist, I’m often glad I did.
Poor Jake La Motta. Of course he’s an appalling human. But am I the only one who thinks E.M. Forster’s “only connect” applies to his desires, too? He can only do it with his anger and his fists. If that isn’t tragic I don’t know what is.
TFB, forgive me but I think you’re getting “identification” mixed up with something else. If I understood you correctly – and maybe I didn’t – you were talking about lifestyles or milieux. Or, more applicable here, characters whose actions are so repulsive that you don’t want to identify with them, so you opt out. When PEEPING TOM came out, that was a fairly common response. I guess that there are some characters who make viewers/readers so morally uncomfortable that they reject the possibility of identifying with them and take it out on the movie/play/novel (Tolstoy felt that way about HAMLET). But I think there’s a difference between identifying with the humanity in a character and emulating their style of living or affirming their path in life. I “identify” with Jake La Motta (in the movie, that is) along with other delusional characters like the heroines of WHITE MATERIAL or A WOMAN UNDER THE INFLUENCE, but I’ve never beaten anybody up or dragged them by the hair and I won’t be doing it anytime soon. In a way, identification is the easy part. That’s why Hitchcock is able to keep us biting our nails along with Anthony Perkins as the car almost doesn’t sink into the lake.
If Jake La Motta didn’t “want” anything, would there really be a movie there? “Formal mastery” is all well and good, but of what? All I can say is that, for me, the humanity in the character is buried under layers and layers of self-laceration and hurt, so he takes it out on himself and everyone else. Not uncommon. What does he want? To be at peace with himself and the people he cares about. It’s a big movie, and, like every big movie, a gamble. For me, the gamble pays off. For others, it doesn’t.
@ Mr. B: Hey, as Billy Batts says in “Goodfellas,” “I’m breakin’ your balls a little bit, that’s all.”
Speaking of “Goodfellas,” when I got home from the gym today I found My lovely Wife watching “Crumb” and I saw that part where he was reacting with some incredulity at the fact that his then-barely-ten-year-old daughter Sophie was so traumatized by a violent scene in “Goodfellas” that she got stomach pains, whereupon he muses that, yeah, maybe there ARE some things that kids ought to be protected from…geez!
Taking off a little from what Kent’s saying, I have to admit that one’s own personal situation DOES in some respects circumscribe the extent to which one “relates,” for lack of a better word, and having grown up in part in a house where there was a crucifx on just about every wall certainly DID inform my reaction to “Raging Bull,” and in some senses the relating was once-removed. As, for instance, when Vicky responds “Father of the Bride” after Jake asks her what movie she was seeing…something, not just the cinephile reflex, makes a palpable response.
I don’t know if it was intentional, but the Musso & Frank scene in GREENBERG includes a shot that reminded me of Bickle’s phone call.
Following up on the above comments made by Kent and Glenn…the scene in ‘Raging Bull’ where Jake is taking a bloody, brutal beating from Ray Robinson and chooses to wrap his arms through the ropes, creating in a sense, his own crucifixion, seemed to me a way for him to do penance. Yeah, I know he tells Ray, “You never got me down…” but it was more than that. Jake is a sinner. He has to pay.
Reminds me of the opening scene in ‘Mean Streets’ and Charlie’s voiceover, “You don’t make up for your sins in church, you do it in the streets…”
How these characters wrestle with their demons and how they struggle to find their way. I can relate. While not on a grand scale such as with Jake but with Charlie…absolutely.
I believe one of the reasons why these two Scorsese films resonate so deeply within me is the way he looks at issues of sin and penance.
The Catholic in me has always been drawn to these stories. These characters.
Who I am. Where I come from. What I know.
Yeah, on some level, I can relate.
@Jason: I agree that Scorsese does scrutinize Jake LaMotta and his other characters, and I agree that his approach is powerful. But I think the limitation of RAGING BULL is that by not creating a space/distance for viewers who have an experience of/relation to male violence different than his, Scorsese limits the appeal of his movie.
@Hollis: The fact that Scorsese does not put any distance between himself and his subject leads to some of his films having visceral intensity that can also be experienced as an irritating insistence, like the person who shows you home movies of his vacation and narrates every moment. There is little space to breathe provided for the viewer with a different set of experiences. I agree that Scorsese is talented in showing LaMotta’s internal pathology, but whatever the internal workings, the exterior actions of a person are fair game for judgment. I probably have a good idea of the internal workings of the men by whom I was gay bashed; but even if I had no idea, I can state firmly that gay bashing is an evil act. LaMotta’s pathology is that of the gay basher, and having been on the receiving end of such violence, having that pathology presented sans distance, no matter how artfully done, is an unpleasant aesthetic experience. I am sure for another viewer, who can see within herself the desire/capacity for such violence (and for me, this phenomenon is what is being referred to by the term “identification”), the experience will be much different.
@Glenn: I do not think there is any reason to envy someone who cannot identify with LaMotta, and I am not holding my nose at his being an animal. It is not that his self-destruction plays out in an uncultured way, but that self-destructive behavior is not a human universal. From an early age I realized that being gay was a drawback that created obstacles for me. I determined that with the odds already stacked against me, there was no need for me to add to my woes by becoming my own enemy. In some ways, self-destructive behavior is an indulgence that only the privileged can afford to indulge.
@FB: I have never felt the urge to hit someone because they bug me. I was at the receiving end of such behavior for the first time in kindergarten – it was in the playground, and I was the different child who did not run fast enough and was not strong enough. Such incidents continued for many years and left me with a thoroughgoing abhorrence of violence – in some ways it was a Ludovico treatment administered by school children. Alas, I do not believe that ever person has his own inner Jake LaMotta.
@Kent: while the subject matter of a work of art can be anything, a judgment regarding the work does include an analysis of the attitude of the work’s creator toward her subject matter. From Kant through Hegel to James and Adorno, this element has been cited as crucial to aesthetic evaluation. The life of Jake LaMotta is a fine subject for a movie, but the unmediated presentation of LaMotta that Hollis points out, imparts a sense of visceral power at the expense of nuance. As I posted earlier, if a viewer is on Scorsese’s wavelength and can feel (rather than just understand) the attraction of violence, then I bet RAGING BULL is a powerful experience. If, however, a viewer does not feel that attraction, the film jettisons the viewer from the work. That is why I so admire CASINO since I believe that Scorsese manages the more accomplished task of creating a work that can accommodate viewers on whatever wavelength they bring to the screening.
@Zach: “To let his id break free and run riot” is a wonderful description of LaMotta’s desire (though I am not sure that it can be considered a “desire” in the strict sense of the word, but is merely a consequence of his pathology). I will also say that I am a person who does not find it impossible not to watch, having spent a great deal of time avoiding such people in attempts at self-preservation.
@Kent: What does identification mean for you? I agree that LaMotta wants something, and your observation that he wants “to be at peace with himself and the people he cares about” is true enough, but so general and non-specific that it does not generate a high degree of identification. But LaMotta’s behaviors in pursuit of his desire, I cannot identify with, and I think that identification as a method of aesthetic engagement concerns both the desire (general or specific, with greater specificity possessing more potential for stronger identification) and the behaviors engendered by that desire.
Brian, the creator’s attitude toward the subject matter is indeed very important. Who said it wasn’t? Not me. What I do think is that it’s an extremely complex issue when you’re talking about certain films, and RAGING BULL is one of those films. I find it silly enough to get into one of those crazy discussions of how much or how little the Coens like their characters. With RAGING BULL, I think it’s misleading to wonder if MS “secretly” worships Jake La Motta, or “approves” of him, or is “attracted” by his violent acts. The feat of the movie, as I see it, is the close proximity to the character and the “distance” that you keep alluding to, occurring simultaneously. I don’t recognize the movie I know from the comments here, which indicate something more along the lines of Stallone’s oeuvre, albeit without the “formal mastery.” What I do understand is Jim Emerson’s comment about coldness. I don’t agree with it, but I understand it.
Identification comes easily, I think. It’s where it evolves to that’s the hard part. You’re right, Jake La Motta’s “goal” is not specific enough to generate a “high degree of identification.” You’re left with nothing but his cruelty, and his humanity. And I am remembering a quote from Herzog that I’ve always liked, to the effect that even David Berkowitz has the basic dignity of a human being.
@ Kent: Sorry, I think I was unclear. No, I definitely don’t mean identifying with lifestyle or milieux. I mean identifying in the cathartic sense, where the audience can sense some kind of commonality of impulse/desire/perception between themselves and the character.
I do think, as GK rightly notes, that commonality of lifestyle and millieux is an undeniable factor in such identification—one sometimes has an immediacy of identification with someone from a similar culture that’s harder (though far from impossible, or even unlikely) with someone from another. And I think Scorsese’s movies, being intensely personal and highly subjective, really heighten the question of what role one’s own identity plays in that process. What many—arguably most—of his male protagonists want, on a very deep level, to suffer and be punished. Why they want to suffer and be punished is never explained because for Scorsese and Schrader, it goes without saying that men want to suffer and be punished—I think it was Schrader who said “Marty believes in guilty pleasures. For me the term’s redundant.” And related to that, I think one can hit a point where there’s such a gap between one’s own experience and that of a character that it just becomes impossible to get on that character’s (and that movie’s) wavelength—it’s not a symptom of bad taste to be unable to get into RAGING BULL, it’s just a sign that you can’t, literally, “get into it”.
You’re dead-on when you talk about how easy it is to create a certain basic identification, as Hitchcock did in PSYCHO. Part of what fascinates me about RAGING BULL is how relentlessly Scorsese avoids creating such easy identification. I find it hard to believe anyone would see the movie as “glorifying” LaMotta’s violence; the movie seems to be doing very much the opposite, shoving us away from any cathartic sense of righteous vengence when Jake lashes out. Scorsese seems to really not want us to empathize with him, which is what gives the movie what Jim Emerson sees as a patina of intellectual exercise despite the very immersive shooting style.
This is a curious contrast to TAXI DRIVER. While BULL keeps you in Jake’s perceptions, right up to fists coming right at the camera, DRIVER seems to be shot in a way that pulls you away from Travis (most famously in the above-discussed hallway shot). Yet the script’s hewing to conventional hero’s-journey beats (with deliberate irony, given the debased world Travis inhabits) creates an almost unbeatable snapping back and forth between being in Travis’ head and on the wrong end of Travis’ hands (or his gun, which is the same thing). It’s curious to think that script structure could be as much, or even more of a factor than direction when it comes to cathartic identification, but I do feel like story structure is somehow central to the very different effects the movies’ protagonists seem to have on viewers.
@ Brian: I think one important thing to remember about Scorsese is that he was never a violent man, even by the generally candy-assed standards of the arts. In fact, his experience sounds a little closer to yours (and mine)—growing up a weakling surrounded by violent males. What defines his movies is that he’s at once horrified by the damage violence does, and mesmerized by the heedlessness with which it’s wielded. What makes him so interesting—besides, y’know, being a master of color, camera movement, and music—is that fierce ambivalence.
I think it’s fascinating the degree to which LaMotta/DeNiro, to put it mildly, resists likability, and thus easy identification. But I think film viewers are more or less engineered to sympathize with the protagonist screened before her/him, and G‑d knows DeNiro/Scorcese run with this capacity in RAGING BULL. I say “sympathize,” precisely because I have a hard time “identifying” with the middleweight wife-beater who balloons up and alienates seemingly everyone, even his brother/manager. I mean, do we “identify” with Celine? Yet, we can’t look away…
There’s something else about the nature of LaMotta as misfit in just about every societal role provided him – Catholic, brother, husband, reluctantly mobbed-up fighter, pedophile nightclub owner, doing awful routines years later, including his recitation of a scene that’s sort of the summa of the Method acting that has clearly inspired the star and director – and thus his inchoate rage gathers breadth and depth as the film wears on. He didn’t get knocked down, but he destroys seemingly everything else in his path because of his nature – a nature, he insists, that is not animal (in the scene where we feel the most sympathy for him, or at least his fists). I tend to hate the smug existentialism informing the phrase “it is what it is” – fucking as opposed to WHAT? – but so much of this film is just that. It feels so lived in while maintaining an un-didactic distance, it’s practically a documentary. The twist of the knife for me, after the Olivier/Sugar Ray rhyme/equivalence: “That’s entertainment.” Wow. Also, ouch.
A masterpiece. And, no, Jake can’t date my daughter.
One thing we can all agree upon without reservation is that the final scene in TAXI DRIVER is obviously a dream/fantasy.
TFB, there’s no doubt that one’s own personal experience always comes into play. What Glenn said above about the FATHER OF THE BRIDE moment is intriguing, because I know just what he means – there’s something about the desultory way she says it, about the fact that it seems like a movie she’d want to see, the fact that she’s making a bed with one of those carved dark wood frames, in a room with that kind of design – it certainly strikes a chord.
On the other hand, not too long ago I took another look at BESHKEMPIR, at this point a sadly all-but-forgotten mid-90s film from Kyrgyzstan by Aktan Abdikalikov. Now, as it happens, I’ve been to Kyrgyzstan, albeit for a total of 2 days, most of it spent in a car or in a screening room. But I could write a book about what I don’t know about Kyrgysz culture and history. And I think it’s a great film. Because the attention that’s brought to what’s filmed is what counts, rather than a familiarity with what’s filmed. Now, I certainly understand that for some people, Italianamerican life is about as foreign as Kyrgysz life, and that the violence which sometimes accompanies that life is both foreign and repulsive. I grew up with Italian aunts and uncles and cousins, and while I didn’t experience that kind of violence I certainly knew a lot of people who did. So yeah, I guess I have a leg up on others. But I don’t love RAGING BULL because Charlie Scorsese reminds me of my Uncle Tony. Marty and Francis Coppola brought something wondrous to movies, because each in his own way attended to the world in which he grew up with loving care and ferocious attention to detail – visual, behavioral, spiritual. People forget that before MEAN STREETS and the GODFATHER films, Steve McQueen and Natalie Wood were playing Italianamericans, in kitchens filled with pots and pans to cook lots of spaghetti. MS and FC attended to their worlds as carefully as Faulkner did to his. Manny once called them, along with other 70s directors, “impatient Prousts.” In the end, I don’t think they were so impatient. So, just as with Proust, it’s not a familiarity with the life being portrayed but the attentiveness of the artist toward that life.
I don’t really agree with your point about guilt and punishment. I would say that it’s not that MS’ characters want guilt and punishment but that they think that they’re almost synonomous with existence – big difference.
I don’t quite get your point about story structure. If you examine it closely, RAGING BULL is just as carefully structured as TAXI DRIVER. It’s just that the structure isn’t as evident.
Kent: Please forgive me if I misunderstood you. I am confused since for me, it appears that on the one hand you say that “…the creator’s attitude toward the subject matter is indeed very important.” In this we agree. Then you say: “…I think it’s misleading to wonder if MS “secretly” worships Jake La Motta, or “approves” of him, or is “attracted” by his violent acts,” and I get confused. If you mean that we should not concern ourselves with what the living, breathing Martin Scorsese thinks about violence, I agree. But I am interested in the attitudes and vision of the “auteur Scorsese” whom I detect in his works of art (just as I am interested in the visions of “playwright Euripides” and “satirist Swift” which I ascertain from their artworks).
Our experiences are different in that you see both “proximity” and “distancing” occurring at the same time, while I experience only “proximity” (and I know well the experience of not recognizing a film from the experience of others: critiques I have read about Almodovar or ALL ABOUT EVE often confound me). I also understand that LaMotta has basic human dignity – everyone does. But where I fail is in understanding how the concept of basic dignity comes into play. Is RAGING BULL a test to see if a spectator can still regard LaMotta as possessing basic dignity despite his violent, abusive nature/behaviors? If all it is a chronicle of a person who possesses human dignity and acts with great violence, then there is really not much there for me. For me (following Kant, Adorno, etc), a work of art enlarges and extends a person’s understanding of the world. When we turn from the screen or page or canvas, our perception of the world is subtly (sometimes more than that) altered – nuances have been added, depths increased. RAGING BULL does none of this for me – it is a Johnny One Note work of art, and as Lorenz Hart reminds us:
Poor Johnny one-note
Sang out with “gusto”
And just overlorded the place
Poor Johnny one-note
Yelled willy nilly
Until he was blue in the face
For holding one note was his ace
FB: I think you are right that TAXI DRIVER allows a viewer either to be inside Travis’ perceptions or stand outside of them. That is why I think it is the greater, more penetrating work of art.
Brian, when discussions get into assumptions over whether this or that artist secretly “approves” or “worships” this or that behavior, I get uncomfortable. By “attitude,” I mean something much more utilitarian and far less morally freighted than what you have in mind. When MS films the nightclub in RAGING BULL, or when Renoir films the wedding dinner in TONI, or when Fincher films (actually, recreates) Washington and Cherry in ZODIAC, or when Godard films the sea in IN PRAISE OF LOVE to take four very different examples, they’re not just saying to themselves, “Okay, I have a scene by the sea in the script, so we need to schedule two shooting days and book two cameras,” etc., etc. They each want this place, under this light, at this time of day, with this sense of distance here, this sense of proximity there, and so on. It’s the commitment to a vision, as opposed to strictly sequential, 2+2 realism or worse. On a more basic level, I think that anyone who films something is attracted by it in some way – how could you not be?
If I remember correctly, you are a practicing Buddhist. So let’s say that Jake La Motta is someone with an unquiet mind. I don’t think the film is a test of any kind – that seems more like a description of HENRY: PORTRAIT OF A SERIAL KILLER. There is a narrative in RAGING BULL. It’s about someone looking for…let’s say wholeness. He arrives at an opening toward self-understanding only when he reaches rock bottom. As MS has said, it’s a movie about a guy who’s nice to himself in the mirror for a couple of minutes.
If the movie were nothing more than people screaming and hitting each other, then it wouldn’t be worth much. So, what I find overwhelming in RAGING BULL are the extraordinary flashes of longing and tenderness – the body language and the gestures and the images carry a wealth of feeling in that movie.
In short, I don’t recognize the one-note experience you’re describing with your Lorenz Hart citation.
Something else about ‘Raging Bull’ which has not been mentioned is the great sound design of the film.
From the opening title sequence, as the beautiful Cavalleria Rusticana plays, to the boxing scenes complete with everything from flashbulbs exploding, punches landing with devastating fury, along with wild animals thrown into the mix for good measure. The nightclub scenes, cool jazzy stuff. Soft piano. It’s all there.
Much like the sound in ‘There Will Be Blood’ I could just listen to these films and be happy.
“One thing we can all agree upon without reservation is that the final scene in TAXI DRIVER is obviously a dream/fantasy.”
My personal De Niro dream-o-meter:
‘Taxi Driver’ – dream
‘King of Comedy’ – dream
‘Once Upon a Time in America’ – not a dream
De Niro’s roles since ‘Jackie Brown’ – I wish it was a dream!
Schrader was at Indiana University this past weekend where they showed the new digital restoration (at their awesome new Theater).
I was surprised at how adamant he was about how unsympathetic Travis should be to the viewer. He was also insistent that the epilogue is to be taken as completely realistic (though obviously, intentionally ironic). He referred to the film as “an evil loop” where Travis simply starts all over again in his “metal coffin”…
Schrader also said that he still doesn’t like HARDCORE or LIGHT OF DAY since it has characters too personal to his father and mother, respectively, for him to see them as successful films.
And apparently XTRME CITY is still in the works (‘a Bollywood American Gigolo’), if financing can come together and Shah Rukh Khan doesn’t change his mind.…
He wants Edgar Ramirez for THE JESUIT first, if he can get him.
Thought some of that was worth passing on here, in case any one was interested.
I think that strange shot of the rear-view mirror and stinging sound is meant to represent his final break with reality or that he’s still crazy…
Maybe it’s an oft-told story, but the stinging sound is a section of the score run backward – MS called Herrmann to ask him for a sting and that’s what he told him to do.
I think Schrader is too hard on LIGHT OF DAY. I remember liking it at the time.
Kent: Thanks for responding. The next time I watch RAGING BULL, I will look for the moments of longing and tenderness in it. I think my failing is that I do not see LaMotta as searching for anything: I do not have a strong sense of him as taking autonomous action (which is why I do not regard the film as a tragedy). LaMotta is a brutalized man who brutalizes in consequence – a horrible reality (and “tragic” in the pop culture sense of the word), but not tragic in the aesthetic meaning of term (as I understand its development over the centuries).
CASINO to me is a great example of the late 20th century iteration of tragedy: at the exact midpoint of the movie, Sam Rothstein is presented in Lear-like glory (sans pants), and has a choice to make: he needs to say either yes or no (a sign on the right of the image presages what will occur). Rothstein saying “no” is comparable for me to Hickey telling Harry Hope that his story is a lie; Vladimir and Estragon staying still; or Chance Wayne declining the Princess’ offer of flight. This scene is my favorite in all of Scorsese, and CASINO as a whole seems the most audaciously constructed of his films.
Brian, I myself would never use the word “tragic” to describe RAGING BULL.
As a point of interest, CASINO was a long shoot and a longer edit.
Kent, “Casino” is one of those films that I like more and more as time goes on (although, honestly, there are few of Scorsese’s films that I like less the more I watch and consider them). Actually, it may be time to re-watch “Bringing out the Dead,” which is one of the few I haven’t seen since it opened.
Glad to see someone mention the sound design of “Raging Bull” which is indeed gorgeous (and, in the true sense, ironic, as with all that glorious, slightly off-stage opera underscoring the awful brutality occuring in these tenement apartments). Particularly like the boxing sequences, which seem to incorporate the literal howls of animals (quite appropriately) into the mix.
And as for the “it was all a dream” reading of the “Taxi Driver” finale – that one I never saw. But I did hear, right from the first viewing, that Herrmann’s score pretty much concludes with the same three thudding chords as “Psycho.” So whatever the audience’s estimation of Travis, BH’s is pretty clear.
I don’t see how ‘it was a dream’ even matters re: Taxi Driver. The whole film is fictional to start with, plus it’s all so overheated and feverish, so…
Personally I think “Tess” is a better movie than either “Raging Bull” (which it competed against for best picture) or “Taxi Driver.” I’m not clear why the movie doesn’t have more champions, of for that matter the novel it’s based on. Hardy seems to be the patronized stepbrother while Austen, Eliot, James and Dickens got all the praise. If Ford seems to provide an optimistic view of community, Polanski’s protagonists are often people betrayed precisely by those closest to them, or whom they should trust. In this sense “The Pianist” is a relatively optimistic film since it isn’t Adrien Brody’s fellow Poles who fail them. It’s not their fault that first his Jewish friends are systematically murdered and then the city of his Gentile fellow citizens is systematically reduced to rubble.
For the sake of clarity, I just want to say that the comment saying that “we could all agree” that the end of “Taxi Driver” is a fantasy was a cross-blog joke busting on Jeffrey Wells’ silly insistence on this point, and not an assertion to be taken seriously. A little on the obscure meta-level, but I had a laugh. So don’t take it seriously!
Thomas Hardy underrated? You might want to reconsider that one.
Stephen, the sound design is as hair-raising now as it was in 1980. The name of the Supervising Sound Effects Editor was Frank Warner, who also worked on TAXI DRIVER and THE KING OF COMEDY, both just as stunning – if you listen closely to the scenes of De Niro alone in his room practicing with his guns, the sense of quiet concentration (the constant sound of kids playing from below, the clicking of the trigger, the knife being pulled from the leather holster, the gun snapping into place on that home-made contraption) is mesmerizing; and in KING OF COMEDY, there’s an incredible effect where Jerry Lewis realizes that he’s being tailed by Sandra Bernhard and keeps picking up the pace until he’s running, accompanied by the nearly subliminal sound of tape running at higher and higher speeds and then dissipating.
The score is something else. There’s the Mascagni, and there’s also “Big Noise from Winnetka” – once you’ve seen the movie, the sound of the whistling in that song is forever welded to De Niro watching Vicky drive away with the boys in slow motion.
Frank Warner talks about his foley methods on one of the commentary tracks accompanying the most recent DVD special edition (presumably carried over to the Blu-ray): he’d physically hold the source recordings in his hands, literally letting the tape drag, slip and catch between his fingers, so that each ‘take’ of the sound effects track had the noises of animals, etc distorted in a unique and irreproducible way.
Count me among the ‘Casino’ lovers too, BTW.
I think a bit of context is required for Kael’s “dumb f–ks” quote. From the RAGING BULL review:
“Listening to Jake and Joey go at each other, like the macho clowns in Cassavetes movies, I know I’m supposed to be responding to a powerful, ironic realism, but I just feel trapped. Jake says, “You dumb f–k,” and Joey says, “You dumb f–k,” and they repeat it and repeat it. And I think, What am I doing here watching these two dumb f–ks? When Scorsese did MEAN STREETS, ALICE DOESN’T LIVE HERE ANYMORE and TAXI DRIVER, the scenes built through language and incident, and other characters turned up. But when he works with two actors and pushes for raw intensity, the actors repeat their vapid profanities, goading each other to dredge up some hostility and some variations and twists. And we keep looking at the same faces – Jake and Joey, or Jake and Vickie. (They’re the only people around for most of this movie.) You can feel the director sweating for greatness, but there’s nothing under the scenes – no subtext, only this actor’s version of tension. Basically, the movie is these dialogue bouts and Jake’s fights in the ring.”
She doesn’t just pull the phrase out of nowhere, as could be construed from the impression given above. I must admit, it never occurred to me before now that using the words of the characters to communicate her frustration with the sequence could be considered condescending, but that’s another limitation of mine I suppose.
Also, the Criterion TAXI DRIVER laserdisc came out in 1990, and was almost certainly recorded in that year – the 1986 labelling by Sony seems to be entirely erroneous. (The Criterion laserdisc RAGING BULL commentary track with Scorsese and Thelma Schoonmaker was also recorded that year, but has been present on all the RAGING BULL DVD and Blu-ray special editions since 2006.)
Apart from the Cassavetes putdown, which really IS condescending, what jumps out at me is: “…there’s nothing under the scenes – no subtext, only this actor’s version of tension.” And: “You can feel the director sweating for greatness.” Which reminds me of Manny Farber telling Jim Hoberman that it was “too aggressively ambitious.” David Thomson wrote something similar in the early 80s, taking issue with the movie’s stream of verbal obscenities. Andrew Sarris thought that it was a breathtaking film, albeit without a moral compass. And there was another complaint that was voiced a lot at the time, perfectly encapsulated by my old friend Tom Allen when he called the film “undiluted vinegar” and deemed it “shockingly depressing.”
30 years+ later, a lot of people forget what a strange object RAGING BULL was when it appeared for the first time. It didn’t operate like anything else around and I think it confounded a lot of people. It still does. Personally, I don’t recognize the movie I know in any of the above descriptions (for instance, I think it’s ALL subtext), but it remains very tough to describe. I think that everyone got a piece of it, and that if you were to put together Kael’s qualified admiration of the film’s blunt poetry (which comes at the end of her piece), Manny’s tribute to the film’s technical astonishments, Sarris’ citation of “breathtaking new dimensions of memory and regret,” Jim Hoberman’s “tribute to stone-age maleness,” Ruby Rich’s focus on gender, Robin Wood’s focus on the homosexual subtext and Thomson’s acknowledgment of the obscene music of the language, you’d arrive at something like a just portrait of RAGING BULL.
Kent, right on with the second paragraph. Funny how that Mt. Rushmore of 1980s film critics & scholars could sketch out the negative space around RAGING BULL without coming to grips with it on their own.
It remains a profoundly strange film. The sound design alone is magnificently bewildering. That seems to be the semi-visible watermark for a great work of art: you don’t quite know how to deal with it, but you know you have to deal with it, somehow.
(Which is a strike against Kael, I think. A lot of her writing conveys the idea, frequently very close to the surface, of “I don’t have to deal with anything. Either flood me with unchecked exuberance or be on your way.)
Kael’s demand to be satisfied, her refusal to try to meet a movie halfway, is annoying. But so common among critics that it’s almost not worth complaining about, like cancer.
Those long Jake vs. whoever’s-around battles are alienating, though, it’s quite true. In a weird way, the movie reminds me of Tarkovsky, and not just because the edgey-yet-surreal eye-level black-and-white photography calls ANDREI RUBLEV to mind. There’s the same fascination with deliberate excess—as in Tarkovsky, scenes go on long after you’ve gotten “the point”. And then, you either get bored—as many did—or else you enter a new kind of perception, where the context of the action becomes more engaging than the action itself. When Joey and Jake continue yelling at each other, I find my eye drifting away from the men and towards the room, which I think is exactly the intended effect.
You know, I think you’re both being a little too tough on Pauline Kael. Every critic has to deal with the problem of a rhetorical stance, and speaking a language that respects the provisional nature of criticism as you’re grappling with a movie is a tall order. What’s important is that she took RAGING BULL seriously. I think she had a pretty specific notion of the ideal cinematic experience, to which it did not conform, along with several other great movies. But she tried to deal with the movie honestly, and I’ll take that over a dozen mindless raves.
Our host jokes that she’s a bigot, and *I’m* being too hard on her? 😀
But yes, you’re quite right, Kael isn’t the philistine she can seem in out-of-context quotes. I’ve never quite forgiven her for dismissing my beloved MARIENBAD, but yes, she’s an honest grappler.
Yeah, ar ar ar.
I was recently at an event where a pre-code picture was screened with a Q&A with a prominent critic who was a late participant in the auteurist wars, and the moderator really went after Kael with a couple of questions, which struck me as odd for a number of reasons, not least of which was the fact that Kael didn’t really espouse the things this guy was accusing her of by implication. Anyone who reads “5000 Nights at the Movies” can see that she had as keen an appreciation for ’30s American cinema as any critic you can name, and that she had a healthy distrust for that which she deemed self-consciously artistic or “artistic.” Certainly she differed with the likes of Sarris over how SERIOUSLY these films and their directors ought to be taken, but she certainly didn’t hold them in disdain. As a result, I found myself in the peculiar (for me) position of standing up for Kael to said moderator after the Q&A, and he in fact conceded my points.
Engaging Kael’s work can be uniquely challenging for a lot of reasons that have nothing to do with her work: the fierce and sometimes defensive loyalty that many of her surviving friends in the criticism racket have toward her, the fans who did not know her but who nonetheless have this Raymond Shaw thing for her, all the various skirmishes and resentments she stirred up in her career, and of course her own caprices. Caprices are hard to hide when you’ve written as voluminously as Kael did, and they’re certainly difficult to avoid on deadlines. Her greatest strength could also be her greatest weakness, I believe:I can’t think of any other post-Warshow critic who was so unabashed in describing her direct experience of a movie. As sharp as her intellect was, always, you always got the sense of a primal response. If you felt that too, you were exhilarated; if you didn’t, you were exasperated. Could she be condescending? Absolutely. But the condescension was never affected; it derived directly from who she was and where her sensibility was located. Although I never connected all that viscerally to her stuff in a positive sense, I’ve eventually come around to the value of it.
I agree with what Richard Brody said about Kael. A great writer, but not a great critic.
I went through a Kael phase in my teens the way some people go through an Ayn Rand phase. Yeah. I still think she clarifies succinctly AND in near-sensual terms the cinema’s singular “contact high” better than anybody who ever lived. But the credibility of her judgments has diminished greatly – with me, anyway.
Also, I confess that I don’t read reviews much anymore. In all but a few cases, reading film criticism is painful to the point of masochistic. Present company excluded, of course.
In other words…what Glenn said.
“Scorcese shoots these mano-y-mano bouts between Jake and his brother like a sweaty boxer desperate to land one connecting blow; it’s that crazy-game-crazy that we’ve come to expect from this fevered director. The endless “fuck you’s” grate then take on the dimension of poetry by limited pugilists, with none of Ali’s wit, bravado or charisma. DeNiro acts like LaMotta fights and we in the audience suffer the blows. Sadly, we can’t punch back.”
– excised paragraph from Kael’s original RAGING BULL review
Lack of a “moral compass”, which comes up frequently as a critic to the film (Sarris, Bliss), is particularly perplexing in evidence of the film itself, which pretty much is concerned with the idea of a character coming to terms with himself. I mean, what’s more “moral” than that? Scorsese also employed the word “resolution” often in interviews at the time of the film’s release.
I think that Scorsese’s combined triumph/failure in RAGING BULL is that he creates a complete, immersive cinematic experience – Wagner’s gesamtkunstwerk as a Hollywood feature. The verisimilitude he achieves comes at a price, however – a spectator can feel like he is being pummeled (especially if he has been on the receiving end of het male violence). In RAGING BULL, Scorsese brings to perfection a new type of cinema, but in jettisoning the distancing devices other art works have used, he engenders new issues. The distancing devices facilitated reception by a broad audience, but with this more immediate cinematic experience, I believe the possibility exists of the spectator being thrown out of the movie. It seems to me that there is alienation as in distancing, and alienation as in making the audience hostile (I had a fine example last night. I went to the NYC Opera and saw “Monodramas” consisting of three modern/experimental operas by Zorn, Schoenberg, and Feldman. The last was Morton Feldman’s “Neither” with a libretto by Samuel Beckett, and was all anyone could ask for in terms of opera, Feldman, and Beckett. But it was clear that for some people, these works repulsed their attempts to engage it. While Feldman may put people off with his atonality and dissonances, Scorsese runs the risk of putting people off with that “aggressive ambition” Manny Farber detected.)
I understand what FB is referring to about Scorsese’s desire to have a spectator’s “eye drifting away from the men and towards the room,” but I am not sure that sure that I agree that the mechanism works the same in his work as in a scene from Tarkovsky or other directors. I have experienced those moments of “new perception” that FB refers to, but it has never occurred when a scene involving violence has gone on too long (according to my inner violence chronometer). Violence causes me to disengage, and the more protracted it is, the harder it will be to get me to re-up with the film. Of course, other spectators may be able to move to a “new perception” during prolonged scenes of violence.
Glenn, I feel pretty much as you do. 15 years ago, I would have agreed with Richard Brody’s assessment, but not now, because in the end I really don’t think there’s a distinction (I did once write pretty much the same thing about Anthony Lane, but what I should have written was “good humorist…lousy critic,” or something like that). Many people continue to portray her as some kind of evil sorceress, but most of them harbor prejudices just as pronounced as her own. I think that she had an issue with films that betrayed a certain seriousness of purpose – even the slightest bit of aesthetic self-consciousness seemed to make her nervous. She appeared to believe that there was only one particular kind of energy in cinema – propulsive. But in the end, what kind of damage do people think she did? HIROSHIMA, MON AMOUR, MARIENBAD, DAYS OF HEAVEN and SHOAH have all gotten along just fine without her support, as have RAGING BULL and GOODFELLAS (and those reviews are hardly pans). It’s not like she barred the doors to the theaters and burned the negatives. As you say, nothing she did was affected. She was often hilarious, and for me reading her at her best was like listening to a great early 70s album – MUSIC OF MY MIND, say, or GONNA TAKE A MIRACLE. I mean that as high praise.
I disagree with about 85 percent of John Simon’s reviews but still find him always readable and insightful, tho he’s too often plugged with bile. But he’s often straight up hilarious in his take on THE GRADUATE’s tone-shift in the middle, writing that “the film crosses this line as if it had diplomatic immunity.” Kael is always great to re-read, especially her takedown of PAINT YOUR WAGON. I don’t have to agree to find them fascinating, as I don’t have to “identify” with the characters in RAGING BULL to appreciate (or not) the film.
And then Wells pointed out that TAXI DRIVER was probably shot in 16mm.
Kael couldn’t compete with that level of cinematic knowledge.
It itched me from earlier, so I went back and checked – the Kael-attributed quote of FIVE EASY PIECES being “a striking movie…eloquent, important, written and improvised in a clear-hearted American idiom that derives from no other civilization” is actually Penelope Gilliatt. She and Kael during the 1970s shared the film critic position at the New Yorker in six-month shifts. From what I see, Michael Dare erroneously attributed it to Kael in his Criterion laserdisc liner notes (still on their website) and it’s been perpetuated elsewhere since.
Jon, that’s really interesting, and thanks for pointing it out. The prose didn’t sound like Kael to me and it seemed like an odd movie for her to like. I do remember a random, disparaging remark she made about FIVE EASY PIECES, somewhere.
There’s quite a few negative remarks about FIVE EASY PIECES throughout Kael’s other writings in the 1970s (check the indexes of DEEPER INTO MOVIES and REELING for a full rundown), at greatest length in her review of the Carol Eastman-scripted PUZZLE OF A DOWNFALL CHILD.
Or Carole Eastman, if you prefer.
Thaddeus Proffitt
Really informative article.Much thanks again. Will read on…