Herrmann, Welles, War, Time, Art(ifice)

Bernard Herrmann, the greatest of all film composers, died on Christmas Eve, 1975, expelling his final breath, as legend has it, shortly after completing the score for Taxi Driver, his final masterpiece. Were Herrmann still with us we'd be celebrating his 100th birthday this June. The coming of the Herrmann centenary was the first prompt for the Art of Time Ensemble's production of The War of The Worlds, which opened at Harbourfront Centre's Enwave Theatre in Toronto on Thursday and closes this afternoon. I attended last night, along with a packed house that included Micheal Ondaatje and Atom Egoyan. Yet, since the original Mercury Theatre/CBS Radio broadcast did not actually feature much in the way of original music from Herrmann, Art of Time decided to preface their man event with a marvellous surprise: a suite of Herrmann's film music inventively pastiched and arranged by Dan Parr, accompanied by a wonderful montage of images from the films referenced. Thus, as the music undulates with doomed romanticism, shrieks and bellows, whirlpools and crashes, the paths of Marion Crane and Travis Bickle, Max Cady and Charles Foster Kane, cross in dream-space; Cary Grant's drunk driving leads to Robert Ryan's wintry footprints which lead to Jimmy Stewart's endless descent; plumes of NYC steam merge with the smoke of burning books; and Klaatu disintegrates rifles gripped by baffled US troops over and over in a lulling apocalyptic rhythm.

What followed intermission was a condensed recreation of Orson Welles' (in)famous 30 October, 1938 alien invasion radio drama. The stage became a studio, occupied by the Ensemble, conducted, as was the Herrmann suite, by Art of Time Artistic Director Andrew Burashko, a trio of actors, including Don McKellar in the Welles roles, and Foley maestro John Gzowski, all of them in period dress, shirt sleeves rolled up, Luckys dangling from their lips, huddling around elegant chrome microphone stands under a suspended glowing sign announcing that we are ON THE AIR. I loved it when all the musicians joined in the vocal hubub to scream together in deathly agony the alien slaughter of earthlings commences, some of them cracking up while doing so. The Brechtian dissonance between the visual and aural experience made for superb entertainment: laughs when eyes were open, chills when shut. Gzowski was inevitably the star of the show, darting silently in stocking feet between a dozen or more bizarre devices, including, of course, a Theremin. It took a moment to adapt to McKellar, given that some degree of imitation is inevitable and he simply doesn't possess Welles' full-bodied resonance, but his cadences were nearly impeccable, his readings compelling, and the prankster's focus he conveyed while instructing his collaborators his impatient gesture and eye contact added to the sense of Halloween mischief.

The most captivating passage of The War of the Worlds however arrived with the broadcast's final section (the one I completely forgot about), in which the mock-live reportage falls away and is replaced by what is virtually a monologue, backed by eerie underscoring, from a lone survivor of the Martian attacks describing in past-tense his journey through the ruins of New York and New Jersey. This part was read by Nicholas Campbell, whose hair has turned white sometime in the past few years, and who settled in under spotlight and delivered a performance of engrossing intimacy, at once playing it for the microphone and, more subtly, the watching audience.

An odour as irresistible as it is odious (and one of the cinema's great portraits of New York): Sweet Smell of Success

A stack of newsprint smacks down on pavement, bound, tossed off a truck, like a kidnapping victim, in synch with the final pow! of Elmer Bernstein’s hysterical jazz aria, and we’re off to troll two bracing mid-fifties Manhattan nights. New from Criterion, Sweet Smell of Success (1957), directed by Alexander Mackendrick and scripted by Clifford Odets and Ernest Lehman, is one of the great New York movies, with relentlessly imaginative location photography by the legendary James Wong Howe. It’s riddled with razor-sharp dialogue (“The cat’s out of the bag and the bag’s in the river”). There’s an edge of seething violence, most of it coming through language and music. It’s a mercilessly cynical story where everybody’s stepping on everybody to get to the top of something. But that mercilessness has its costs.

We follow Sidney Falco (Tony Curtis), a press agent hanging by a thread. He leaves his topcoat in the office to save on coat checks. It’s unclear if he sleeps or ever finishes a hot dog. At least he has more than one suit: in a beautifully composed early scene the frame’s divided by a door, on one side Falco changes his pants, on the other his secretary lingers with concern. Falco’s frantic to suck up to J.J. Hunsecker (co-producer Burt Lancaster), the towering columnist who can make or break anybody, who can save Falco from ruin with a sentence about a client in the evening edition. Hunsecker has a sister named Suzie (Susan Harrison) who’s in love with a guitar player. She could be in love with a monk for all he cares. He wants her for himself, though for what purpose it’s ambiguous (if unambiguously repulsive). He assigns Falco the task of destroying the romance. Everything hinges on that.

Curtis is brilliant, nervous yet intensely focused, a dog that can bark and plead in the same sentence, twisting himself into pretzels to work magic, seated, in a key scene, just behind Lancaster as though perched at the heels of his master—or moments away from pushing him off his pedestal. Something in Curtis’ performance looks forward to Ray Liotta in Goodfellas (90). His Falco starts with his soul already sullied, yet as his actions become more appalling we can’t help holding out for his return to sanity, though the bit where he pimps out the cigarette girl is tough to get past. Of course, we keep watching, riveted to the bitter end, even if by that point the artifice is showing.

The only true innocent in Sweet Smell is, of all people, a (white) jazz musician. Suzie, psychologically frail, shivering in her furs, is ostensibly innocent too, though with Hunsecker as her brother, and a final twist revealing her capacity for manipulation, we have to presume something seedy deep within. Anyway I can go along with these ingénues, but there’s something about Hunsecker I confess I never completely believe—though he’s precisely the sort of symbol of corruption and power Odets seemed to need to believe in.

Hunsecker’s based on real-life gossip columnist Walter Winchell, who was unhealthily obsessed with his daughter rather than his sister (which might explain why Suzie’s less than half her brother’s age). Hunsecker’s basis in Winchell inevitably recalls Citizen Kane (41) and Kane’s basis in real-life media titan William Randolph Hearst. We he cast in the role, Orson Welles surely would have identified with Hunsecker, smiled a little, had some fun, and for moments make us want to be Hunsecker, however uneasy the thought. Though rigidly compelling, Lancaster by contrast seems no fun at all. His contempt for Hunsecker’s all too clear. He seems uninterested in conveying much inner life, save a few moments involving Suzie, like that glance he casts through a crack in the curtains while she sleeps.

Turns out Welles was actually Lehman’s first choice to play Hunsecker, something I learned from the audio commentary by author James Naremore (whose More Than Night is one of the strongest books on film noir). The highlight of Criterion’s superb supplements, Naremore’s is a model commentary track. Without ever snowing us, he moves nimbly between historical context, production anecdotes, technical data and performance analysis, outlines which writer was responsible for what, and draws attention to so many subtle and terrific little bits of behaviour.