Tag: Performers

Cannibal Culture 3

By Ray Sawhill

More and more of the images in the American sleaze magazine Celebrity Sleuth are taken from video screens. How is the sexual makeup of young men being affected?

As an adolescent, I was entranced by Princess Caroline of Monaco, whom paparazzi were forever snapping in states of semi-undress. Ever since, I’ve responded erotically to almost any photograph taken with an unusually long lens. By now there must be several generations of young men raised on TV whose imaginations have been imprinted by the visual qualities of the video image. All those horizontal lines! “Honey, would you mind standing behind the Venetian blind, just for a minute?”

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I buy Celebrity Sleuth for the photos they run of naked actresses. Naked actresses have been my passion for years. As a boy, I enjoyed Playboy’s annual “Sex in the Cinema” feature more than I did its monthly smorgasbord of prettily-posed flesh. Movies being what they are now, it’s the possibility of seeing an actress I care about undress that keeps me a moviegoer. What gives me pleasure is the conjunction of the physical, the spiritual, and the esthetic — although when I tried to make the case to female colleagues that Sharon Stone had given a great performance in “Basic Instinct,” I was jeered down and informed that I’d simply been turned on. So I’ve kept it to myself that, in Jim McBride’s “The Wrong Man,” Rosanna Arquette gives her best performance since “The Executioner’s Song.” I know that someone’s going to say, You just liked it that she finally got naked again.

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When you compare the horror-and-kung-fu bimbos who are also featured in Celebrity Sleuth with the real actresses, you understand a key distinction. The bimbos display themselves professionally; they’re there to serve. The actresses are relating to something, or focused on their roles, or projecting an emotion. They’re naked, yet retain their mystery. So you feel involved with them.

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John Hinckley wasn’t unusual in having a fantasy relationship with a movie actress, and he may not have been unusual in thinking he had a real one. There may be a little Hinckley in many male moviegoers. The few times I met actresses who had dizzied me onscreen, I was confused and upset. They didn’t seem aware of what we’d been through together.

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English actresses often look amused and in-charge when they appear nude, while French actresses display their poise and style — the French expect their culture products to have an erotic sheen.

In Gérard Corbiau’s new “Farinelli,” about an 18th century castrato opera star, women fans swoon over Farinelli, who’s conveniently masculine-looking and broad-chested. He makes out with them and works them up, then steps aside to allow his (mangier but better-equipped) brother to complete the coupling. The actresses (Elsa Zylberstein and Marianne Basler) flush, breathe deeply into their sensations, and let feelings ripple through their bodies.

What Hollywood usually presents as an extravaganza of lighting, music, and set-design is here made to seem to occur inside the women; watching them is like watching those roses open at the beginning of “Age of Innocence.” I imagined I was a third brother, adept at Euro-connoisseurship; my wife tells me she identified with the women, enjoying being savored. So much for the hegemony of the “masculine gaze.”

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Americans don’t have a comparable tradition of sexual appreciation. Celebrity Sleuth seems a perfect embodiment of our conflicts. It’s full of childishly smutty puns (“Enjoy Joan Chen’s Twin ‘Peaks’ And China ‘Moon'”), giggly italics, and lipstick-and-swimming-pool colors. At the same time, it’s indisputably reverential and adoring. The women are bathed in that special light that descends only when you’re chosen to appear in both a movie and a magazine. If pop culture has become the modern Gospel, these stills are our versions of those Renaissance panels that portray dramatic highlights from the Bible.

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We might all learn a thing or two about actors by leafing through Marilu (“Taxi”) Henner’s sweetly inane, unabashed new autobiography, “By All Means Keep on Moving” (Pocket). To Henner, an affair is a “little work of sexually gratifying art.” About one such affair, she tells us, “Actors are usually so desperate for work that they’re inclined to create fantasy improvs. Lloyd and I had some pretty hot ones. One was a teacher-student act … Detention often included a few over-the-desk spankings.”

Actors: Drama-seeking, amoral — there’s a start.

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The early in-production pieces about “Showgirls,” Paul Verhoeven’s first film since “Basic Instinct,” have been confused. The journalists don’t seem to know what angle to take on the film, which is set among the strip clubs and topless revues of Las Vegas, and is almost certain to be rated NC-17. The problem is that no one involved seems ashamed of the project, or interested in making a political or artistic case out of it. They just seem to want to make this movie. In interviews, Verhoeven is suavely amusing about his taste for sensationalism, and the actresses speak seriously about their commitment to showing an “interesting world that’s worthy of depiction.”

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Uma Thurman is set to play Marlene Dietrich in a film to be directed by Louis Malle from a John Guare script. It seems like perfect casting. Uma, along with such other young actresses as Diane Lane, Kelly Lynch, Jenny Wright, and Laura Dern, is something new — an American performer who conveys tragic sexual fatalism of a sort that we’re used to getting only from Europeans.

Uma appeared, of course, in “Henry and June,” the first film to be rated NC-17, and frames from some of her other movies are regularly featured in Celebrity Sleuth. Recently, though, she has been avoiding nudity, which is a pity. If she were to use her body more freely, Uma could be as redolent a presence as Dietrich, yet ratchet up the intensity and sensuality one more notch. She may simply feel she needs to defend herself against exploitation — but watching actresses fight to overcome exploitation is one of the great ongoing American screen dramas.

©1995 by Ray Sawhill. First appeared in The Modern Review.

George C. Scott, 1927-1999

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By Ray Sawhill

Although he was only 71 when he died this week, George C. Scott seemed like a performer from another era entirely. He had a giant presence and a raging masculine flamboyance that’s almost unimaginable in this era of Damons and Afflecks.

Born in 1927 in Appalachia, he grew up in Detroit. After four years in the Marines, he was in college studying journalism when he discovered the stage. He quit school soon after and threw himself into acting, doing more than a hundred roles in stock, where he became familiar with the joys and perils of the bottle. With the booze came the brawls. That striking nose of his? Broken four times in fights, and a fifth in a New York mugging. Discovered in 1957 by New York impresario Joe Papp, who cast him in the title role of “Richard III,” Scott received, by the end of that year, four major theatrical awards.

For more than two decades, he conducted an astounding career, becoming a star on TV and a major force on the stage. In the movies he roared through memorable performances in “The Hustler,” in “Dr. Strangelove” (as the war-mad Gen. Buck Turgidson), and in “Patton.” He had pugnacity and grandeur; he looked a little like Merle Haggard and a little like a statue of a Roman emperor. As an actor, he scorned, he thundered, he threatened. Mostly he dominated, working the old flamboyant-hambone tradition at a time when the softer, more introverted Method style was the rage.

Scott became notorious for his attitude towards prizes, labeling the Oscars a “meat parade,” and “a beauty contest in a slaughterhouse.” When it was announced at the 1971 Academy Awards that he had been voted the Best Actor prize for “Patton,” he was at home, watching ice hockey on TV. The following year he was voted an Emmy, and he refused that as well.

Did the booze burn him out? Although he was busy during the ’80s and ’90s, nothing he did during that time had anything like the resonance of so much of his work from the ’50s through the ’70s. In 1990, he had a heart attack. In 1996 he collapsed onstage during a Broadway performance of “Inherit the Wind,” and was operated on to correct an aortic aneurysm. Among his five marriages were two to the actress Colleen Dewhurst, and one to another actress, Trish Van Devere. The acting, it seems, was also in the blood; one of his six children is the actor Campbell (“Big Night”) Scott.

©1999 by Newsweek Inc. Reproduced by permission.

“Pickford” by Eileen Whitfield and “Becoming Mae West” by Emily Wortis Leider

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Mary Pickford

By Ray Sawhill

In the early part of the century, before the movie business outgrew its seedy origins, it was one of the rare fields where an ambitious woman could hope to make a professional mark. Women wrote and directed; some stars had a measure of control over their movies that a Julia Roberts can only dream of today.

Among the most influential early film women were Mary Pickford and Mae West. In 1909, when she landed her first movie job, Pickford was just scraping by; in 1915, she was one of the world’s best-known women. Despite her winsome on-screen persona, she became the first actress to produce her own films, a cofounder of United Artists, and a major shaper of film acting. In “Pickford” (Univ. of Kentucky), a knockout of a biography on sale next month, Eileen Whitfield shows a rare gift for making sense of acting styles, and for bringing to life the world of silent movies.

Mae West was Pickford’s on-screen opposite, a sashaying cartoon of a woman of the world, appraising (and enjoying) men with self-mocking relish. Behind the scenes, she was Pickford’s match in tenacity and nerve; her producers never thought they were making anything but “Mae West movies.”

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Mae West

In her zesty “Becoming Mae West” (Farrar Straus Giroux), Emily Wortis Leider points out that by the time she barreled into movies, West had 35 years of theater and vaudeville behind her. She liked prizefighters, cross-dressers and stealing credit from collaborators. She wrote a lot of great comic lines (“I like restraint — if it doesn’t go too far”) and gave them all to herself. But by the mid-’30s, Pickford had stopped acting, the business was aspiring to respectability and West’s freedom was curtailed. Since then, few actresses have managed to wield their measure of creative power.

© 1997 by Newsweek Inc. Reproduced by permission.

“Kinski Uncut” by Klaus Kinski

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By Ray Sawhill

For Klaus Kinski, the star of such films as Werner Herzog’s “Fitzcarraldo,” over the top was never close to enough, and in “Kinski Uncut” (Viking) he produced what is probably the most outrageous actor’s autobiography ever — less a memoir than a hyperbolically pornographic performance piece.

The book, which was a scandalous best seller in Europe, was on its way to American stores in 1988 when Random House’s lawyers grew alarmed and had it recalled — though enough copies got loose to make it an underground mini-classic. The version that has now been released by Viking has been trimmed of a few pages — “There was too much monotonous sex with chambermaids,” says the book’s editor — but includes new details about Kinski’s final years in California. Initials now disguise a few potentially litigious figures.

What made the book a cult sensation are its portraits of film people and its horror-comedy accounts of sex. It’s the cheerful relish Kinski takes in his own egomania that earns the book a place on the camp shelf, alongside such wonders as “Hollywood Babylon” and Anaïs Nin’s unexpurgated diaries.

© 1996 by Newsweek, Inc. Reproduced by permission