Saturday music: Cat Stevens: Tea for the Tillerman and Teaser and the Firecat
1. After a morning of blogging and getting my fantasy baseball lineups situated, I jumped back in the time machine and returned to medieval England and plunged back into The Pillars of the Earth. In my reading/listening right now, all the action centers around the fire that nearly destroyed Kingsbridge Cathedral and its aftermath.
2. We watched the last hour of All the President's Men this evening and mostly my mind was on two things. First, my admiration for the acting in this movie grows every time I watch it. Whether it's Jason Robarts or Jane Alexander or Dustin Hoffman or Robert Redford or Hal Holbrook or Robert Walden, to name a few, this movie features one solid, often brilliant, piece of character acting after another. Sally Aiken. Jack Warden. Martin Balsam. Lindsay Crouse. Solid. Solid. Solid.
Secondly, I relished Gordon Willis' cinematography, especially having just watched Godfather II. Willis was the Director of Photography in all the Godfather movies (and a string of Woody Allen's movies -- Annie Hall, Interiors, Manhattan, and others). Willis is a genius at filming in low light environments, of darkening a room or an environment and dotting or streaking it with light, of filming faces partially in shadow and partially illuminated. His photography is helping us experience what's happening inside the characters he photographs -- as Michael Corleone's soul shrinks, as his criminality and killing drains him of vitality, Willis shoots his face in more and more shadow and the room at the boathouse grows darker and darker, as if the Michael's callousness is projected into the very physical spaces he occupies.
Characters in All the President's Men, like Deep Throat and Hugh Sloan, are caught in morally ambiguous situations. If you remember the conversations in the parking garage between Woodward and Deep Throat, you might remember how Hal Holbrook's face is mostly in shadow, often barely lit only by the cigarette he's smoking. It's stunning camera work, both in its physical effect and its deepening of how the movie characterizes Deep Throat. Likewise, when Woodward and Bernstein make their last, late night visit to Hugh Sloan, Willis conveys the conflict Sloan feels within himself to bring what he knows to light but to keep what he knows hidden, keep it in the dark, in the contrast between light and shadow on the actor Stephen Collins' face.
I'll mention one other scene. It's in Bernstein's apartment. Woodward just learned from Deep Throat that the reporters' lives might be in danger. Woodward comes into the apartment, turns Bernstein's stereo on really loud, and they communicate at Bernstein's desk by typing to each other. The picture of Dustin Hoffman and Robert Redford, side by side, illuminated in a dark apartment by the desk lamps, eagerly and anxiously typing out messages to each other is arresting, and, I'd have to say, seeing it all these years after the movie was released, knowing what titanic careers Hoffman and Redford have had, it's an iconic image, not only of the characters Woodward and Bernstein, but of these two actors working side by side.
3. We decided to give Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid a try and, after about an hour, I crapped out and went to bed. I hadn't seen this movie since it came out. I watched it at the Rena Theater one Sunday afternoon with some of the guys. I loved it as a high school sophomore. As I went to bed, I wondered if possibly I had, for lack of a better phrase, outgrown this movie. The stuff I thought was so funny back in 1969-70 just didn't register tonight and the bicycle riding scene didn't seem as charming as it did 50 years ago. Maybe I was just tired and, if I return to it earlier in the day, better rested, maybe it'll work better for me. We'll see.
Here's a limerick by Stu:
Remembering back to your first.
Was it cool or a thing that you cursed?
Did it provide you some fun,
Get you home when you’re done?
Or leave memories that just are the worst? (First car)
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