5/7.26. Enchanté: The State Theatre/One Sings, The Other Doesn’t/Peppermint Soda
The State Theatre
So this is resolutely not a nostalgic project … and inevitably, it is. It revives college nights at the State Theatre, an art house of double features, midnight cult hits and the odd rock or blues concert.
When I first pondered a Fonda book back in 2007, my impulse was to check in with The State’s shambolic overlord, Barry Solan. In February 1979, Solan had re-opened the 1929 vaudeville house, conveniently located at the end of Newark, Delaware’s one-way, five-block Main Street as it cut across the University of Delaware’s campus. (As a student I had hoped to work there. No soap. Everyone wanted to work there.) His programming followed what he called a “hardcore art policy,” which meant the offbeat and underground, concert movies and international films, The Rocky Horror Picture Show Saturday midnights and Bergman’s The Magic Flute at Christmas.
Concerts were rare but choice. Local boy George Thorogood played The State several times. The Nighthawks opened for Rick Danko. “I always say the Muddy Waters concert was the best $3500 I ever lost,” Solan told me.
The programming turned over every few days; when the quarterly schedule came out you taped it to the wall and planned accordingly. Barry’s mother baked jumbo chocolate chip cookies, the hit of the concession stand. You could smoke inside, so imagine slouching in the largely empty balcony, watching Bowie in The Man Who Fell to Earth, exhaling Kool plumes into the projected light. Imagine packed interactive Rocky Horror screenings, rice tossed, toast thrown, and a motorcycle revving down the aisle as Eddie arrives on screen singing “Hot Patootie — Bless My Soul.” Imagine meeting friends in the lobby between pictures and getting the news that Reagan was obliterating Carter.
Revisiting all this didn’t help much directly with the book, it turns out. The State is long gone, demolished for a bland little shopping galleria. This notebook’s twinbill-dusted taste, though, comes straight from The State.
One Sings, The Other Doesn’t (9/23/77)
Gentle countercultural gem from France’s Agnès Varda, a beautifully thought-through feminist saga of two women who bond young in 1962 and navigate loves, losses and frustrations well into the 1970s. Abortion seals their kinship: in ’62, Suzanne is 22, living with a married photographer who can’t get a divorce and can’t sell his work, and she’s pregnant with a third child she can’t reasonably raise, while Pauline is 17 and on the edge of finishing school, but more interested in singing. Pauline, an upbeat and prickly redhead as played by Valerie Mairesse, lies to her parents and gets the illicit abortion money for Therese Liotard’s impoverished, deeply melancholy Suzanne.
Hotheaded Pauline moves out of her parents’ house, drops out of school and changes her name to Pomme (Apple), while Suzanne has to regroup after tragedy befalls her husband, whose sullen photo studies of women prove to be a window into his troubled soul. From there the friends’ paths diverge, yet they stay in touch after running into each other at the 1972 Marie-Claire Chevalier abortion rights trial. Apple is a hippie folk singer and would-be dancer-choreographer in love with a handsome, seemingly progressive Iranian economist she met in Amsterdam (though just wait ‘til they live for a while in the patriarchal society of Iran), while Suzanne survived emotionally harsh treatment living on her disapproving parents’ grubby farm and now runs a family planning center on the Mediterranean.
Varda’s story is rough on parents and spouses, enough so that Vincent Canby complained in his New York Timesreview that the picture’s separatist polemics made moot the winning performances and surehanded moviemaking. But Canby’s carping seems sour, even if Varda’s scheme blatantly celebrates women knitting together their own emotional communities, and even if Apple’s earnest songs are wincingly raw and on-the-nose. It’s the ’70s, man; just look at the failed promise of the wilting E.R.A. and the feminist motifs percolating through a number of notable movies this particular year. Varda deliberately assembles women in groups and scrutinizes the nurturing, not depicting it as easy, but plainly asserting that starchy parents and sketchy men often make it necessary.
Apple and Suzanne are drawn to one another initially in solidarity, but swiftly also out of deepening affection. The earthy Mairesse, frizzy hair adorned with beads as she performs on streets, and the delicate, angular brunette Liotard are compellingly warm together, forging an easygoing, radically accepting lifelong friendship that avoids the kind of competitive dramatic baggage that would make flamboyant Oscar bait of The Turning Point later this year. The Turning Point is about narrow spotlights; One Sings embraces an open-hearted communal spirit, and an idea of unconventional family-making that now seems largely mainstream.
Apple’s wan songs (original folky tunes, with lyrics by Varda) seem hokey now, but hardly improbable to their moment. The formidable upside is the ease of Varda’s sweep as the story moves across years and countries; the eye on pre-revolution Iran is particularly fascinating, showing a society far more open back then yet still so gender-segregated that Apple has to scamper back to France, and the bargain she makes with her not-thoroughly-villainous husband (she marries the handsome economist in Iran) is the twist that gives the picture its biggest progressive kick.
Varda’s 1969 hippies-in-Hollywood Lions Love (…and Lies), starring Hair songwriters James Rado and Galt MacDermott with Warhol star Viva, American director Shirley Clarke and Varda herself, was very end-of-the-’60s, and this is quite middle-of-the-’70s. Watch the two together, or twin this with The Turning Point and its much, much more conventionally histrionic female frenemy-ship.
Peppermint Soda (7/15/79 U.S., 12/77 France)
Writer-director Diane Kurys was 30 when this first picture was released in the U.S., and it’s as good an evocation of early teen life at school as you can find on screen. It’s her own story (Alain Le Henry gets co-credit for the screenplay), set in 1963, about her 13 year-old self and her 15 year-old sister, living with their divorced mother in Paris after their father sends them back on the train (he has them for summers).
Kurys has a great eye and ear right from the start, as the hordes of girls swarm and gossip and then form rigid lines as the usual gargoyle figureheads try to impose discipline on what will be a long year. The kids wickedly disrupt class, intuitively abusing the weakest teacher, passing notes and cheating, suffering humiliations from the headmistress, the insulting art teacher, the tubby gym teacher. While these seem like broad types, the essential tension rings true, and Kurys gets splendid performances from the young cast. Eléonore Klarwein is pinched, suspicious and generally disgruntled as 13 year old Anne, anxious because she hasn’t yet gotten her first period, slacking in classes, more interested in trying on pantyhose and sneaking out the café for peppermint sodas. Whenever she can, she eavesdrops on the conversation in the bedroom shared by the mother (a loving-scolding-fretful Anouk Ferjac) and her older sister Frédérique (Odile Michel, confident and bossy as the older sibling). Males are largely but not entirely absent. The father is so hapless that when he takes the girls for a meal, the conversation goes in stunted circles, and while the older sister has a beau (the schoolyard rumors of sex are hilariously wrong), she also has a dicey encounter with the father of a friend who has run away, during which, caught up in the melodrama of it all, she invites, and gets, a nervous kiss.
Lycee Jules-Ferry, with its ample, echoing halls, its huge brick presence, its window views of the Eiffel Tower and its massive courtyard where a memorable rebel yell bounces off the walls, is the richly atmospheric Parisian school where much of this was filmed. It’s the story of a year, peppered with incidents, and the tone is strikingly mature for a first-timer, largely because Kurys takes so seriously the girls’ pensiveness, anxiety, mischief, meanness, and anger. Comparisons have often been made to Truffaut’s The 400 Blows, and that’s not wrong, but this colorful, closely observed semi-autobiographical portrait details a world quite unknown to Antoine Doinel. Watch with the bristly 1968 British boys’ school picture If…
4.23.26 War/Anti-War: Summertree, Vietnam! Vietnam!
Summertree (6/17/71)
An understated antiwar story from a 1967 Pulitzer-nominated play by Ron Cowen, who would go on to develop TV’s An Early Frost and Queer as Folk. The screenplay observes Jerry (an upbeat, alive Michael Douglas, Cowen’s colleague at the O’Neill National Playwrights Conference in 1967, where he first played this role) strumming guitar, dropping out of college to audition for the music conservatory, connecting with nurse Brenda Vaccaro (sunny, grounded), maintaining a contentious yet polite relationship with parents Jack Warden and Barbara bel Geddes. When the conservatory says they love his talent but can’t admit him as a transfer, he’s suddenly vulnerable to the draft. Innocence turns to dread as the story shows how hard it is to get out of it.
Cowen was 22 when Summertree went through the write/rewrite/produce/critique process at the O’Neill, and while Douglas was replaced for the off-Broadway staging by David Birney, and Douglas’s dad Kirk then bought the movie rights, Cowen’s 1972 New York Times reminiscence on the O’Neill premiere betrays no sour grapes. Yet the screenplay, credited to Edward Hume and Stephen Yafa, plainly made changes, including a new subplot with Jerry signing on as a Big Brother to Marvis, a young Black kid whose older brother is already in Vietnam, keeping in view problems of who serves and who swerves out of harm’s way. As Douglas searches in the schoolyard for the kid (Kirk Calloway, precociously swearing and giving Douglas the side-eye), the movie even indulges in a Spartacus joke, with all the Black kids looking at the White man and mischievously blurting, “I’m not Marvis!” “I’m not Marvis!”
The picture is directed by Anthony Newley, a British-born ’60s showbiz force as a Vegas-grade crooner, songwriter (“What Kind of Fool Am I?”, “Goldfinger”) and a theater and film composer (Stop the World — I Want to Get Off, Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory). Odd choice, and he mainly stays out of the way of the actors, taking careful looks at Douglas and Vaccaro playfully falling in love. It’s the picture’s weakness; you wonder what it might have been like in the hands of a Coppola, who had just made the supple character study The Rain People, or ’70s shaman Hal Ashby, whose directorial debut The Landlord opened mere months before this. Screens have already been shredded for several years by riot/protest/Generation Gap movies, and this would barely cut it at a fest with, say, Getting Straight, The Strawberry Statement (similarly penned by a young man in the thick of it — James Kunen was 20), The Revolutionary, Joe (with a climactic tragedy nearly identical to Summertree’s, though that father, played by Peter Boyle, is far more virulently reactionary), M*A*S*H, Catch-22, Soldier Blue, Zabriskie Point, and Woodstock. And that’s just choosing among 1970 films implicitly or explicitly in the same topical ballpark.
Still, this Douglas kid holds the screen, and as he weighs his choices with pals Rob Reiner cracking jokes and Teri Garr driftily listening in, even his soft disagreements with Warden (whose light touch with paternal pride and traditional expectations, like bel Geddes’s quiet steel, are right in Cowen’s congenial key) carry weight. Father and son don’t explode in argument, but the war plays out on the living room TV as the stakes escalate. And credit where due: Newley films the brief appearance of Vaccaro’s husband, a soldier back from Vietnam, with terrifying stillness. Bill Vint is almost all menace and aura in the role, barely speaking, practically reeking of napalm.
Of course Marvis’s brother is reported dead in Vietnam. Of course the soulful, gentle Douglas character decides Canada is the only option. The plot’s final twist may have seemed pat to contemporary audiences, and the earnest drama winds up in tune with the radical Hair: music can’t save our lamb, and off he goes. Yet it lands like a deep, stupid betrayal — familial, and national.
Watch with Joe (Susan Sarandon is the daughter), or with Elliott Gould as a Vietnam vet back on campus and Candice Bergen as his protestor girlfriend in Getting Straight; watch with Haskell Wexler’s in-the-thick-of-the-’68-Chicago-protests Medium Cool, or with Michelangelo Antonioni’s head-trip view of tragically estranged American youth, Zabriskie Point.
Vietnam! Vietnam!
An unreleased documentary production of the U.S. Information Agency, with John Ford as executive producer and Charlton Heston narrating this two-part, 52 minute defense of the war effort. Part One, “The People and the War,” racks focus from long views of town and country scenes to closeups of barbed wire, then surveys the ordinariness of citizens working fields, eating rice.
“But now,” Heston intones, there are “intruders”: refugees from the unhappy, invading, communist North, perpetrators, along with the Viet Cong, of carnage and atrocities shown in footage of amputees and their prosthetics, in photos and film of bodies burned and bloated and left rotting in the streets or in the weeds. The North’s indiscriminate massacres are followed by callous mass graves; the footage here is of skulls and bones, and of mourning in streets, while, in the streets of North Vietnam, victory rallies celebrate the aggression.
Continuing the narrative of the war from its beginning to the end of the ’60s (footage of JFK addresses are frequently inserted to illustrate American policy decisions), the South Vietnamese initiate flight missions to discover enemy weapons, and the U.S. and other countries begin to help defend South Vietnam. Depictions of the North’s brutality accrue (we see horrifically emaciated prisoners of the Viet Cong), as do images of the seemingly benign, practically saintly efforts of the U.S. military, with soldiers seen washing the feet of wounded Vietnamese.
Then come the talking heads of the American military wives lodging complaints against the North Vietnamese and the U.S. antiwar movement, conflating them as one and the same. The camera zooms toward the young son on Sybil Stockdale’s lap as she reads from her letter to Sen. Fulbright “expressing the idea that the most vociferous critics of the war have very probably lengthened the war and thus had a detrimental effect on the possibility of release for the prisoners. At that time, you refused to see me on the grounds that my idea was so preposterous — and that was his phrase — that visiting with me would serve no purpose.”
Hanoi is accused of cruel treatment of prisoners, per testimony of wives and returning prisoners, and then the project transitions to Part Two, “The Debate,” toggling between news footage of public figures weighing in on both sides, from Dr. Benjamin Spock (against) to California governor Ronald Reagan (against simply bringing home the troops because “the price for that kind of peace could be a thousand years of darkness”). Veterans speak for “freedom,” and discount protestors’ views because they “haven’t been to Vietnam,” “don’t know anything about it.” Students and elected officials opine on whether the war is just, is winnable, is affordable, is a mandatory stand against Communism.
The ending again sweeps across the decade with statements from Ike, JFK, LBJ and, finally, Nixon, addressing North Vietnamese aggression, communist oppressions, the principle of American loyalty to international allies, and therefore staying the course, with a wild jump cut from Nixon’s platitude to a cheering crowd of diplomats — but seemingly a different crowd than the one he was addressing, or at the very least, a jarringly different moment.
“Without defense,” Heston sums up, speaking of the South Vietnamese, “their families and country would live no more.”
In 1985, Heston would narrate “Television’s Vietnam: The Real Story,” produced by Reed Irvine’s conservative Accuracy in Media and aired on PBS as a “rebuttal,” in the words of the New York Times, to PBS’s own 13 part “Vietnam: A Television History” in 1983. See John Corry, “‘Television’s Vietnam: The Real Story,’ On PBS,” The New York Times, June 27, 1985; see also Fox Butterfield, “A Critique on PBS of Vietnam Series Sets Off a Dispute,” New York Times, June 13, 1985.
From the June 10, 1971 New York Times, Tad Szulc, “$250,000 U.S.I.A. Movie on Vietnam, 3 Years in the Making, Being Shelved”:
“It’s a dead duck and it will stay in the can,” a source in the agency said in response to inquiries whether the film, directed by John Ford and now virtually completed, would ever be released.
It was reliably reported that the head of the agency, Frank J. Shakespeare Jr., had concluded that the changing military and political situation in Vietnam, as well as domestic political considerations, now raised doubts on the film’s value as convincing and productive propaganda.
In the absence of a decision by Mr. Shakespeare that the film should be distributed, the sources said “Vietnam, Vietnam!” will simply be allowed to “fade away.”
Only a few months ago, the agency’s motion picture and television division sent out circulars to posts abroad saying that the film would soon be available for distribution to foreign television networks and stations or for cinema showings.
The agency has refused to show the film to newsmen pending completion and a decision by Mr. Shakespeare to authorize its distribution abroad. But it was understood that “Vietnam, Vietnam!” sought to portray the United States Government’s side in the war controversy.
The act of Congress that set up the U.S.I.A. specifically barred domestic presentation of the agency’s films.
Nelson Pressley 