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Spanish Bombs Cinema.
By Ed Rampell
The New York International Independent Film & Video Festival is screening works by emerging and established indie filmmakers and videomakers in L.A. from July 30-Aug. 6. This film and video festival may be rough around the edges compared to AFI, LAFF and some of L.A.’s other glitzier, more homespun festivals, but it does present some worthwhile work in a variety of genres from many nations that Angelenos may otherwise not be able to take a peek at.
A case in point is Catalonian director Oriol Porta’s stellar documentary, A War in Hollywood, that chronicles Tinseltown’s first cause celeb, the Spanish Civil War, which ended 70 years ago this year. The movie colony rallied to this anti-fascist “crusade,” holding star-studded fundraisers to purchase and transport ambulances to Spain’s beleaguered Loyalists, and more importantly making features and documentaries during and after the struggle against Generalissimo Francesco Franco (in the immortal words of Chevy Chase, he’s “still dead!”), who overthrew the democratically elected Spanish Republic in 1936 and was backed by Hitler and Mussolini. Indeed, one of the doc’s interview subjects is contemporary activist actress Susan Sarandon, who proves that Hollywood’s romance with these issues persists seven decades later.
Much of this documentary is told through the eyes and words of the only American screenwriter who fought for democracy in Spain with the Abraham Lincoln Brigade, Alvah Bessie, who wrote two books about his eyewitness experiences there and went on to receive an Oscar nomination for Best Writing, Original Story for the 1945 Errol Flynn WWII actioner, Objective, Burma! In 1947 Bessie became one of the Hollywood Ten, and his 1930s exploits as a “premature anti-fascist” helped to get him blacklisted, proving once again that no good deed goes unpunished.
Bessie’s fellow screenwriters, Walter Bernstein and Arthur Laurents – who both had brushes with the Hollywood Blacklist -- are interviewed in A War in Hollywood, which artfully cross-cuts between archival footage, original mostly talking head material and various movies, including clips from Bernstein’s 1976 anti-blacklist dramedy, The Front, starring Woody Allen and Zero Mostel. In it, the House Un-American Activities Committee inquisitors persecute Mostel’s character, Hecky, for having signed a petition in favor of Spain’s Republicans. (Bernstein also wrote the 1988 blacklist drama, The House on Carroll Street.)
There are scenes from Laurents’ beloved 1973 romance, The Way We Were, with Barbra Streisand playing a young idealistic communist in the1930s, who makes an impassioned anti-Franco speech at a college campus, noting how the Soviet Union is the only nation coming to the aid of democratic Spain.
Scenes from the first Hollywood feature about the Spanish Civil War – John Howard Lawson’s stirring 1938 film, Blockade – starring Henry Fonda as Marco, an anti-Franco partisan are shown. In it, Soviet cargo ships try to run a Franco embargo in order to save starving Spaniards. In A War in Hollywood Marco is seen scrambling for cover during a fascist bombardment (which calls to mind the aerial bombing of Guernica), and in the grand finale he looks straight into the camera, demanding to know, “Where is the conscience of the world?” In her autobiography Jane Fonda wrote how her father’s films, such as Blockade, affected her and forged her political consciousness.
Another film released while the struggle against Franco was still taking place is Joris Ivens’ This Spanish Earth, a classic 1937 documentary narrated by Ernest Hemingway, who co-wrote the doc with John Dos Passos and Lillian Hellman. There are great clips from that doc, and also archival footage of Papa Hemingway in Spain, in Porta’s picture. Scenes from Hollywood’s 1943 adaptation of Hemingway’s For Whom the Bell Tolls also appear in A War in Hollywood, and it’s interesting to note that veterans of the International Brigades, including Bessie and Moe Fishman (who is repeatedly interviewed onscreen) denounced the novel and film version.
In addition, Franco’s censorial reach extended beyond Espana’s borders, as Hollywood studios sought access to the Spanish market. Henry King’s 1952 screen adaptation of Hemingway’s The Snows of Kilimanjaro, starring Gregory Peck, is also criticized for the insertion of a flashback to a Spanish Civil War battle that depicts the Republicans in a negative light. However Peck, the archetypal La-La-Land liberal, “redeemed” himself in 1964’s decidedly anti-fascist film, Behold a Pale Horse, which pits Peck against Anthony Quinn’s pro-Franco commandante.
Alvah Bessie’s son, Dan Bessie, is also one of the interview subjects in A War in Hollywood, and he will be at the 10:15 p.m., Aug. 6 screening of the documentary.
Through Aug. 6 the NYIIFVF screenings are at the Regency Fairfax Theatre at 7907 Beverly Blvd. For more info visit www.nyfilmvideo.com.
If I were a rich man we would be happy. A scene from Fiddler on the Roof.
Pantages Theatre performs world famous musical
By Ed Rampell
There once was a droll poster campaign depicting people who were obviously non-Jews, such as an American Indian, with the advertising slogan: “You don’t have to be Jewish to love Levy’s, real Jewish rye.” In that same spirit, you don’t have to be Jewish to love Fiddler on the Roof – a real Jewish musical. Music by Jerry Bock, lyrics by Sheldon Harnic and book by Joseph Stein, Fiddler on thh Roof is arguably one of the 10 best Broadway musicals of all time.
Featuring songs such as: “Tradition"; “If I Were a Rich Man"; “Matchmaker, Matchmaker”; and “Sunrise, Sunset,” Fiddler has has a crowd pleasing, universal appeal combined with the culturally specific stories of Sholom Aleichem, the master storyteller of Yiddishkeit (Jewishness, or the traditional Jewish way of life). However, I strongly suspect that these stories about the simple milkman, Tevye, who struggles to support his four daughters and henpecking wife in a constantly changing world beyond his control, likewise attracts non-Jewish audiences, too; especially any member of a minority group that’s experienced discrimination.
The original 1964 production starred the immortal Zero Mostel, and Fiddler ran on Broadway for 3,000-plus performances. When I was a lad back in the “Mother Country” (New York), I saw Herschel Bernardi’s rendition of the milkman who philosophically quibbles with god and, despite his lack of education, tries to endow his family and village with a sense of religious and cultural continuity.
Topol, who starred in and was Oscar-nominated for Norman Jewison’s 1971 mediocre movie adaptation of Fiddler, brought the house down at the Pantages Theatre with the opening number, “Tradition.” After 38-plus years as Tevye, it is nothing less than remarkable that Topol, who turns 74 Sept. 9, gives such a strenuous physical performance -- moving, dancing and, of course, singing with that deep voice of his, for almost three full hours. It is truly phenomenal and quite inspiring. What a trooper – and trouper.
The Israeli actor’s Tevye is introspective; songs and scenes deftly express his inner state of mind. Tevye’s arguments with the almighty could inspire an atheist in his/her non belief. Indeed lord, would it have spoiled some vast eternal plan if Tevye had been a wealthy man? Why were he and the chosen people chosen to suffer so? Be that as it may, Tevye yearns for riches so, above all else, the humble milkman could become educated, studying the holy books and discussing them with learned men at temple. Not for nothing do Jews sometimes refer to themselves as "People of the Book.”
The musical’s title is derived from an image by Marc Chagall, himself a Russian Jew born in Belarus. There are various interpretations but to me, the musician fiddling on the roof symbolizes that, despite the precariousness of life in oppressive czarist Russia, the Jews were still determined to celebrate life. The story unfolds against the backdrop of revolution, as Russia – and along with it, many traditions – are rocked and changed forever. Student intellectual Perchik (Colby Foytik) is obviously a Bolshevik, and it’s refreshing to see a positive depiction of a revolutionary on the mainstream stage. The communist breaks customary practices, woos Tevye’s daughter, Hodel (Jamie Davis), resists the Cossacks and joins the revolution in Kiev.
So what’s not to like? Scenic designer Steve Gilliam’s sets fail to evoke an Eastern European village the way Chagall’s paintings do. Some dance numbers are too long – especially the nightmare and wedding scenes.
But these are far more minor quibbles than Tevye’s ongoing debates with god. The audience at the Pantages went nuts during the performance, applauding, clapping and crying.
I, too, was very moved by Fiddler, not least of all because I am descended from Kiev and Odessa Jews from the Ukraine. When I grew up the Holocaust was still fresh in people’s minds and I can still remember the spooky tattooed numbers on the arms of concentration camp survivors that bespoke of unimaginable evils and horrors. And I always knew about pogroms – the riots against the Jews in their Eastern European shtetlsAnatevka.
But what threw me for a loop and knocked this happy-go-lucky fiddler from his perch was the czarist order to Anatevka’s Jews to sell their homes and land and to get the hell out – in just three days. Can you imagine such hardship and injustice? How can people be so heartless and cruel? Where in the world will these homeless, dispossessed Jews go? This just broke my heart, as I thought of my ancestor, Alexander Rampell, sailing to the Promised Land in the 1880s. And of the ancestral Kwass family, drafter dodgers fleeing the czar’s army, which had conscripted the men folk in 1904 to go fight the Japanese..
But then I saw Tevye, yoked to his cart like a mule, pulling the family’s meager belongings, leading them to god knows where. But wait, choreographer/director Sammy Dallas Bayes cleverly has the wandering Jews move across the stage from right to left – towards America. It will be no picnic there but they will be spared Russia’s Civil War, Stalin’s terrors, the famine in the Ukraine, the Nazi occupation of the Ukraine and Hitler’s mass extermination of Ukrainian Jews at Babi Yar, etc.
So maybe Fiddler does have a happy ending, after all. Don’t miss it! To life!!!
Fiddler on the Roof performs at Pantages Theatre through August 9. For more info call: 800/982-ARTS or see: www.BroadwayLA.org. Fiddler will also be performed at the Orange County Performing Arts Center August 11-23. See: www.ocpac.org.
An acting ensemble shines under Malibu’s starry, starry skies.
By Ed Rampell
It’s uncanny how artists find contemporary relevance in the classics. After Hurricane Katrina, L.A. Opera presented Bertolt Brecht and Kurt Weill’s opera, The Rise and Fall of the City of Mahagonny, that, among other things, depicts a devastating hurricane. Now, the Will Geer Theatricum Botanicum is staging a play about a storm of another kind: the mortgage and foreclosure crisis.
Loss of an estate is at the heart of Anton Chekhov’s last play, The Cherry Orchard, which originally premiered in 1904 at the much-vaunted Moscow Art Theatre and was directed by the legendary Constantin Stanislavsky of “Method Acting” fame.
When it premiered, the Russian playwright’s dramedy reflected class conflicts under czarism, as displaced nobility grappled with upstart, emancipated serfs. A year after The Cherry Orchard debuted revolution swept Russia, so it can be said that Chekhov was right on the money. The Theatricum’s clever adaptation of the play by Heidi Helen Davis and Ellen Geer (who also co-stars as Lillian Randolph Cunningham, the clan’s Grande Dame) updates the action from turn-of-the-last-century Mother Russia to not today, but rather to Virginia in the 1970s.
Lillian and her brother, Gates Randolph (the dapper tippler William Dennis Hunt), are the last in a long line of landed gentry, who are unable to adapt to a rapidly changing society where their genteel world is being turned upside down. The Cunninghams are drowning in debt and deficit spending, as they have not generated new forms of income from the wealth they inherited, primarily in property. In particular, their beloved cherry orchard is being threatened with clear cutting, in order to make way for development – a subdivision, mall or, as Joni Mitchell sang, “They paved paradise and put up a parking lot.”
I recently attended the performance of another great Brecht play, Saint Joan of the Slaughterhouses, and a theatergoer pointed out that despite its being set in 1930s Chicago, the Pacific Resident Theatre production did not have a single cast member of color. But there is no such “caste system” at work in this diverse ‘70s-set Davis/Geer version of Chekhov’s tragicomedy, with its integrated actors and references to the Civil Rights movement. Steve Matt plays Lawrence Poole, the grandson of one of the Cunningham’s slaves and son of one of the dynasty’s servants. Oh, how the lowly Lawrence of Suburbia has risen in the world, and the mighty have fallen, as Poole has become an economic force to be reckoned with. Chekhov, of course, is especially known for his penetrating psychological insights, and what Poole has gained in the material world has come at the cost of his soul – and soul mate (Tippi Thomas as the thwarted Velina, Lillian’s adopted daughter who has overseen the estate in her absence).
The Theatricum’s Orchard also refers to the ‘60s/’70s counterculture. In a bit of crafty casting, Willow Geer portrays hippie-ish Anna, the daughter of Lillian, who is played by Willow’s real life offstage mother. Lily-white Anna romances the perennial student, Terence Moses (Marc Ewing), an intellectual who echoes the era’s Black and Flower Power philosophies, as he rejects whitey’s Old Order, as well as Poole’s grasping commercialism.
Co-writer Davis, who has also directed productions for East West Players, deftly directs this expert acting ensemble of 16 thespians, performing in an amphitheatre beneath the stars at Topanga Canyon. As such, the open-air theatre has no proscenium arch and as the Cunninghams face dispossession a chilling moment comes after scene one. In lieu of a curtain, the lights dim and black-clad stagehands silently, swiftly remove the entire set, consisting of furniture and household furnishings, in order to literally set the next scene. While it may be unintentional, the stagehands resemble repo men, as if the Cunninghams, unable to pay their sub prime mortgage, are being foreclosed upon and rendered homeless. It is the brilliance of this production to take a 1904 Russian play and make it relevant to not only today, but to 1970s’ Virginia. Old Virginny will never seem the same again, and this Orchard is an orchid.
The Cherry Orchard will be performed through Sept. 26, at: 1419 N. Topanga Canyon Blvd., Malibu.. For more information call 310/455-3723 or go to www.Theatricum.com. Picnickers welcome before and after performances.
Louise Bourgon makes headways in The Girl From Monaco.
A comedy thriller enhanced by location shooting
By Ed Rampell
Co-writer/director Anne Fontaine’s The Girl From Monaco is an entertaining, witty, genre bending story about Bertrand Beauvois (Fabrice Luchini), a high power, media savvy attorney defending a 70-year-old wealthy, but uncooperative witness an accused of murdering her younger lover, a member of the Russian mafia, in Monte Carlo. At first unbeknownst to the French lawyer, the defendant’s son hires a bodyguard named Christophe Abadi (Roschdy Zem, who co-starred in Indigenes, the great 2006 feature about the role North African soldiers played in Europe during WWII) to protect Bertrand from possible mob reprisals.
Enter into this combustible mix Audrey Varella (Louise Bourgoin in her star-turning, scene stealing feature debut), a delightfully ditzy, sexy young weather girl on a Monegasque (as Monaco’s natives are called) cable TV station. Back during Hollywood’s much vaunted Golden Age, central casting might have tapped Barbara Stanwyck or Katharine Hepburn to play an Audrey-type character in a screwball comedy like Preston Sturges’ 1941, The Lady Eve, or Howards Hawks’ 1938 laugh riot, Bringing Up Baby.
Audrey, who is half the suave French barrister’s age, quickly embarks on a torrid affair with Bertrand, who is twice her age but half as experienced. This complicates Bertrand’s increasingly complex relationship with his bodyguard, one of Audrey’s many former lovers. As the trial unfolds in a Monte Carlo courtroom and the courtship spirals out of control, the usually reserved attorney accustomed to being in complete control loses his cool.
What makes the girl from Monaco tick? Is Audrey simply a blithe, free spirit uninhibited in her sexuality? Is this beauty with an abdomen to die for a prostitute the Russian mob has hired in order to unnerve and distract the defense attorney, in order to blow his case? Or is Audrey merely a small time, small town girl awestruck by Bertrand’s fame and sophistication? Underneath her quirky dumb blonde persona is the scooter driving Monegasque really a shrewd social climber and gold-digger who yearns for life in the fast lane and has identified Bertrand as her ticket out of Monaco and into the big time of Parisian high society?
As the alleged crime of passion has taken place in the Principality of Monaco, the trial is set at one of the world’s smallest nations, probably best known for Princess Grace (Kelly), ritzy casinos and as a tax haven and hangout for rich and famous yachties and others. But what is it really like for Monegasques to grow up and live in one of the world’s most diminutive domains, flanked by France and Italy?
Auteur Anne Fontaine knows two or three things about life in a miniscule royal realm, as she hails from the Grand Duchy of Luxembourg, which is surrounded by France, Germany and Belgium. One of the best things about The Girl From Monaco is that it was shot on location at the Mediterranean enclave, with exquisite cinematography by Patrick Blossier, the veteran French D.P. who has also lensed films such as Indigenes. Location shooting greatly enhances authenticity and realism; it’s extremely disappointing when movies such as, say, Billy Crystal’s 1995 clunker, Forget Paris, uses the brand name and allure of an actual locale to sell itself and then mainly takes place elsewhere. Or, in the case of films such as Suzi Yoonessi’ Dear Lemon Lima, which just premiered at the Los Angeles Film Festival and purports to be about indigenous Alaskan culture, but then turns out to be entirely shot at Washington, instead of in the 49th State. On the other hand The Girl From Monaco’s location shooting – including in an actual Monte Carlo courtroom – bestows the ring of truth upon this feature, enabling audiences to enter what is for many viewers a fabled far away fairy tale fiefdom where Princess Grace and Prince Rainier once preened for the press. (Adding to the realism is the amusing factoid that like her harebrained temptress, Bourgoin had actually been a television weatherwoman.)
The script by Fontaine and Benoit Graffin takes twists and turns as treacherous as the mountainous route where a speeding Grace Kelly met her tragic destiny. Like Fontaine’s 2003 film, Nathalie, which co-starred Fanny Ardant, Gerard Depardieu and Emmanuelle Beart as a kinky hooker, The Girl From Monaco comments on sexuality and contains a plot twist I didn’t see coming. Its mélange of film noir and screwball comedy makes Monaco more complex than most Hollywood flicks, with their typical one trick pony plots.
Audrey ultimately meets with the same fate most movie “bad girls” who enjoy sex ultimately do, and becomes a femme fatality. The Girl From Monaco can also be seen as a subtle commentary on the situation of displaced Arabs who have migrated to Europe.
Be that as it may, a star has been born with one of the best French imports since the Marquis de Lafayette, the Statue of Liberty, fine wines, camembert cheese and Brigitte Bardot. Louise Bourgoin is as bubbly as champagne, and that girl from Monaco is truly the woman who broke the swank at Monte Carlo.
Spinning sounds around the Electric Daisy Carnival.
Riding the ears
By Carlin Nguyen
The 13th annual Electronic Daisy Carnival was something of a marvel to check out. A lot of fanatics with light glow sticks, loud music everywhere and, of course, shouts and screaming everywhere you go at EDC.
This year’s EDC was the first to be spanned out in a two-day format. There were as many as seven concert spots to find the right type of music any event goer would crave for.
According to festival producers, on the first night, as many as 45,000 people attended the event. On the second night, the attendance went up to about 90,000. As evident by one fan who was down at Cosmic Meadow (outside in front of L.A. Coliseum logo), the DJ announced to the public that this year’s EDC became the largest music festival in North America..
Along with the music, no carnival is complete without such rides as the carousel, Ferris wheel, and bumper cars. Unfortunately there was always a waiting line. Also, there were assortments of food booths ranging from Mexican food to Asian food.
Getting from point-to-point was difficult. I advised anyone against trying to walk through the standing room pit stands of Kinetic Field (inside L.A. Coliseum). On one occasion my colleague and I tried to leave the pit stands but knew we both could easily lost in the crowd.
The event was capped off by arrays of fireworks at Kinetic Field. Such artists as David Guetta whom his set mixes consisted of the late Michael Jackson were marvelous for everyone to witness. And then there was Paul Van Dyk who closed out the event. His music was awesome. As soon as he finished his set, he took the opportunity to take photos and sign autographs with the public afterwards at closing.
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