Take One (Oct 1976)

VEERONT, ies oe A few title changes of interest: LAURENCE HARVEY’s Welcome to Arrow Beach is now known as Tender Flesh; TOBE HOOPER’s just-completed Death Trap is now Slaughter Hotel; and James Monaco’s fave-rave Ganja and Hess has apparently been re-cut and retitled as Double Possession. Some Production Notes: Photography has begun, near Toronto, on SIDNEY LUMET’s Equus, starring Richard Burton and Peter Firth. ... Universal announced that COSTA-GAVRAS will produce and direct his first Englishlanguage film for them, about the aftermath of a nuclear fallout. MILOS FORMAN is at work on the preproduction phase of his film version has. scheduled start of shooting on JOAN (Hester Street) SILVER’s second feature, Between the Lines. From a story by Take One-contributors DAVID HELPERN and FRED BARRON, the film is a contemporary comedy set in Boston at an alternative newspaper. ... MART CROWLEY, who authored both the play and film of The Boys in the Band, has been signed to write an original screenplay, Tough Customers, for Warner Bros. Blasts from the Past: DAVID SECTER (Whose Winter Kept Us Warm was — in 1965 — one of the Canadian film industry’s first commercial successes) is heading a group of 25 New York filmmakers, known as Total Impact, which is finishing a feature-length comedy called Getting Together. And ALLAN KING, whose company went out of business after producing the critically Couple, has put together a_ million dollars’ worth of financing (from private investors, the Canadian Film Development Corporation, and the Saskatchewan government) to film Who Has Seen the Wind, based on the classic W.O. MITCHELL novel. August 16, 1976 An open letter to Henry Kissinger, Secretary of State, United States of America Dear Mr. Secretary: This may be the only letter you get all year that doesn’t request, demand, plead or ask you for anything at all so it’s okay if you put it aside until you feel like a break from the more onerous duties of running the State Department. | just thought | should tell you that we were talking about you the other adian Association of Motion Picture Producers (which is, as you might expect, a group of people who are responsible for making most of the Anglophone Canadian feature films). The way it happened was like this: our Secretary was going through our correspondence (we produce a lot more correspondence in Canada than we produce movies, but that’s another story) and we came across a copy of a letter written to you last month by eighteen United States Senators. Well, it’s not often we get to see important American government papers so we told him to go ahead and read it out loud. You may recall the letter; it’s the one that asks you to tell the Canadian government that the United States wants to discuss the whole range of border television issues and doesn’t want Canada to stop Canadian advertisers buying commercials on American TV of Hair. Mid-September is the acclaimed Warrendale and A Married night at a special meeting of the Canstations and deducting the costs from Fritz Lang Fritz Lang is dead at 85. He often referred to himself, only half jokingly, as “one of the last of the dinosaurs,” and there was a kind of truth to that. Certainly to many of us it seemed that Lang had always been there; his death marks the end of an era in the history of cinema. Is there a filmmaker on whom he was not an influence — from Hitchcock to Chabrol to Wenders? Is there a filmgoer, even among those who never heard his name, who was not forced as a result of Lang’s influence to confront the ambiguities of and question basic assumptions about morality, justice, loyalty, and “love” — from Berlin in the twenties to the United States in the fifties? Although critics are still arguing, largely without point, over the relative merits of his first “German period” in relation to his “American period” (most overlooking entirely the “French period” which produced the beautifully romantic Liliom), Lang himself never differentiated between the two, save to note the differences in the conditions under which he worked in Berlin and Hollywood. His Own personal favorites — Der Mude Tod, M, Fury, You Only Live Once, Scarlet Street, The Big Heat — came from both periods and provided something of a cross section of the themes and methods which remained consistent and personal over his more than half a century of filmmaking. Lang made fewer bad films than any of that handful of directors who truly deserve the adjective “great”. And Lang was always very clear and honest about those films with which he was not satisfied and the reasons for his having accepted to make them (“Even a director has to eat,” he would joke in his Viennese accented English). As he escaped with dignity and courage from Nazi Germany, so he survived, and often triumphed over, with courage and dignity, producer stupidity, studio interference, and blacklisting in the United States. Although he sometimes alienated his casts in the endless takes necessary in his search for perfection, they never failed to admit later that they had never been better than under Lang’s direction. When he found Hollywood in the fifties a place where perfection was unwelcome, he completed a circle in his life and career by returning to Germany to make The Indian Tomb, The Bengal Tiger, and The Thousand Eyes of Dr Mabuse — working with material and characters he had created fifty years earlier. Although none of the three were financially successful in North America (due primarily to distributor stupidity which was responsible for awful re-editing David Overbey lives in Paris, contributes frequently to Sight and Sound, L’écran fantastique (of which he is also an editor), and his book The Neorealism Reader is to be published by St. James Press (London) later this year. 4 and atrocious dubbing) they were both box office and critical hits in Europe. Indeed, Claude Chabrol and most French critics consider the final films Lang’s masterpieces. He had intended in the early sixties to make one last film with Jeanne Moreau — his scenario Death of a Career Girl was one of the best things he had v GRETCHEN BERG Jean Renoir (I.) and Fritz Lang (r.), conferring at the 1967 Montreal Film Festival. ever written — but his eyesight began to fail and would no longer allow for the close attention to every detail in every frame he demanded of himself. The project was cancelled. Although he stopped making films, he never “retired”. Lecturing, taking part in festivals, seeing films, reading, writing (his essay written for // Tempo’s 85th birthday salute this year shows no diminishing of intellectual or emotional powers), Lang stayed intensely alive until the day he died. In his Liliom, Lang wrote “If death were the end, it would be an easy thing to be a man.” Certainly his own life was never easy; he spent it creating films which demonstrated both the difficulties of life and the glories of struggling against them. Those films continue to live, for Lang still has much to teach us; in that way, at least, his death is no end. David Overbey