Harlan Ellison's Watching (24 page)

(There are also assorted short stories that have been collected in volumes variously titled
Killer in the Rain, Trouble Is My Business, Pick-Up on Noon Street
, though most of them were originally published in the marvelous volume called
The Simple Art of Murder
, containing Chandler's brilliant essay on mystery writing under the latter title.)

Of the three giants of the detective story genre—Dashiell Hammett, Cornell Woolrich and Chandler—Marlowe's creator has always seemed to me to be the best. (Though since the Fifties, Ross Macdonald and John D. MacDonald have inherited the crowns, not merely by default and the death of the three masters from whom they learned their trade, but also on the basis of their impressive writings.) Chandler was smooth, dealt with the undercurrents of venality and weakness that riptide through society's seamier depths, and in Marlowe eschewed the larger-than-life image of the detective as cultural hero, choosing rather to make Marlowe an average man with an above-average fascination for low-life. Because of the clarity of delineation of Marlowe, even the worst of the films made from Chandler's novels has had a
je ne sais quoi
, a vitality, a verve that detective films made from lesser sources could never touch.

And when Marlowe films have been right—as in
The Big Sleep
and
The Lady in the Lake—
they have become small masterpieces of Americana, for they've captured within the idiom of suspense a cross-section of the tone of life in our country at that time. And
The Long Goodbye
abides by the tradition. It is right. Very right indeed. And the responsible parties are director Robert Altman, actors Gould, Rydell, Van Pallandt, Hayden and Arkin, but most of all scenarist Leigh Brackett . . . about whom a few words and an open love letter.

Leigh Brackett once wrote a story with Ray Bradbury titled "Lorelei of the Red Mist." She also wrote science fiction adventure stories through the Forties and Fifties with smashing titles like "The Beast-Jewel of Mars," "The Citadel of Lost Ages," "The Dragon-Queen of Jupiter," and "Lord of the Earthquake" to name only the tamest. She also wrote a clutch of hardboiled detective novels such as
An Eye for an Eye, The Tiger Among Us
, and, most recently,
Silent Partner
. She is also married to sf writer Edmond Hamilton with whom she lives in a tiny Ohio town, far from the Hollywood charnel house, which has not stopped her from writing the screenplays for such films as
13 West Street, Rio Bravo
and—surprise!
—The Big Sleep
.

I have known Leigh and Ed since I was seventeen years old, and I must tell you that being able to praise unrestrainedly her latest screenplay is a singular pleasure. For a while there—back in the Sixties when Leigh and I were on the Paramount lot together, she writing bummers for Howard Hawks, me writing bummers for Joseph E. Levine—it seemed the enormously talented Ms. Brackett might have fallen under the thrall of schlock filmmakers. But
The Long Goodbye
is tough, tight, tense and structured so intricately I still haven't unraveled some of the puzzle twists. The dialogue is as sharp and
au courant
as anything Leigh's ever written, the small script touches that light up the background are all there, and wondrously, there is none of that self-conscious hipness so many of our younger scenarists seem hellbent on cramming into current scripts.

And as all but assholes like Bogdanovich will admit, without a strong script from which to build, any given film's chances of succeeding artistically are reduced geometrically in relation to the arrogance and ineptitude of the director. But Robert Altman had the crafty and cunning Brackett script from which to begin, and on its solid base he has created a film in the mode of
McCabe and Mrs. Miller
, which he also directed, but which was far less successful than
The Long Goodbye
. In the former film, Altman and cinematographer Vilmos Zsigmond employed the "flashing" method of film processing to achieve a Brueghel-like muted pastel look, smokey and fuzzy, and very unnerving to this reviewer. In that film there was also unrestrained use of mumbled dialogue that kept one straining and uncomfortable throughout. Altman and Zsigmond repeat the technique here, but somehow the mood and pace of a contemporary suspense thriller allow the fuzzy look and semi-audible jabber to play like a baby doll.

And in casting Elliott Gould as Marlowe (a choice I would have thought lunacy before the fact) Altman has struck a bold masterstroke. Gould is perfect. It is hardly the Bogart Marlowe, clipped, self-assured, dangerous . . . or the Montgomery Marlowe, urbane, witty, charming . . . or the Garner Marlowe, ill-cast and embarrassing . . . but it is a contemporaneous Marlowe that strikes the perfect balance between cynical optimism and tarnished knight errant. A little comical, a little self-deriding, a little out-of-touch and off-the-wall . . . but so splendid in totality that one can only hope Altman and Gould do it again, next time with a remake of
The High Window
.

Supporting Gould—and it's his show all the way, make no mistake—Sterling Hayden is bold and more than welcome back on the big screen, Nina Van Pallandt makes a promising and well-realized debut performance, David Arkin is properly pixilated as a retard pistolero and Mark Rydell (himself a director of some talent) is outstanding as the utterly Reform Jewish thug, Marty Augustine. So impressive is Rydell that in one of the three scenes of violence in the film, a scene of sudden movement and madness, Rydell sets it up so well, plays it so consummately, that one feels one's heart go lub-dub as the Coke bottle smashes.

I have heard filmgoers who've seen this movie put it down as incomprehensible, oddball, and simply bad. They are wrong.
The Long Goodbye
is a brilliant film, cast and written and directed with brio and courage. I venture to guess that in years to come it will assume the proportions of a cult film, and twenty years from now people will be quoting from it the way they quote from
Casablanca
. This is a must-see film.

And finally,
I Love You Rosa
, this year's Israeli entry for the Best Foreign Film Academy Award, a motion picture I understand was "acclaimed at the Cannes Film Festival," whatever that means.

Written and directed by Moshe Mizrahi, the film tells of a time in Israel when the Hebraic laws decreed that a widow had to marry her dead husband's brother, if he was unwed, in order that his family line would not die out. In the case of
I Love You Rosa
the brother is eleven years old and the widow is a strongly individualistic woman who wants to choose her own husband.

Similar to
Lady Caroline Lamb
only in both films' examination of the minutiae of cultural mores, this character drama succeeds where the other fell flat on its aristocracy. Ably acted by Ms. Michal Bat-Adam as Rosa and fourteen-year-old Gabi Otterman as the young Nissim,
I Love You Rosa
is a frequently painful, occasionally tendentious, ultimately arresting study of emerging character in a time and a place most of us will find fresh and different.

It is a good film, but it is not one I can get terribly excited about. Perhaps it's because I'm Jewish and many of the supporting characters remind me of my relatives, memories of whom are better left buried.

Call this a reserved review.

Or call me Ishmael.

Either way, I have some good news for you . . . and some bad news for you, Traupman.

So Traupman says, "Okay, Doc, give me the bad news first!" And the doctor says, "Well, while I was operating, I sneezed and cut off your penis."

So Traupman breaks down, and when they revive him he says, "What's the good news?"

And the doctor says, "I ran a biopsy on it, and it isn't malignant."

See you in two weeks.

The Staff
/March 23, 1973

They have asked for a regular column dealing with fantasy and science fiction in the visual media: theatrical features, television movies, continuing TV series, stage productions, live performances other than plays and/or musicals. In short, everything but recordings and comic books. Okay, I can do that.

What I
cannot
do is another hype column such as the nonsense-festooned handouts one encounters in fan magazines, which are nothing better than culls from the trade papers of the motion picture industry,
Daily Variety
and
The Hollywood Reporter
. These are Rona Barrett-style ephemera that promulgate the wish-fulfillment stories planted by dynamiting publicists and every half-assed turkey who has taken an eighteen-month, two-grand option on a Zelazny or Dick novel, in hopes he or she can blue-sky a development deal with a network or studio.

Nor can I pretend to be a righteous, card-carrying
cineaste
proffering reams of erudite and punctilious copy espousing the
auteur
theory
à la
Bogdanovich. I am unalterably opposed to the theory that the director is the "author" of the film, perhaps because I'm a writer and I
know
, from firsthand experience, that most directors cannot direct their way to the toilet on the set. But I'll talk about that another time. Right now I merely wish to set down a few ground-rules about what this column
won't
be. (True
Cahiers du Cinema
mavens would be on to me in a hot second, even if I pretended to be a deeply serious student of film, when I copped to having fallen asleep repeatedly in
L'Avventura
, while having seen the 1939 Korda version of
The Thief of Bagdad
more than fifty times, clearly making it my favorite movie of all time, beating out
Vanishing Point
by only six viewings.)

With rare exceptions, I will not review specific films or series. There are too many self-styled authorities overrunning the scene already. (You must understand: any
schmuck
who goes to a movie and whose ego gets in the way of good sense, who runs one of those "cinematic insight" raps—as shown in example in Woody Allen's new one,
Annie Hall—
and then has the good fortune to con some editor into accepting such drivel, can be a film critic or reviewer. They do it not out of any deep and abiding love for motion pictures, nor even because of an understanding of what it takes to create a film . . . they do it because they can get free screening passes to the studio press showings. They are scavengers. Cinematic illiterates who pontificate without a scintilla of talent for moviemaking of their own. I put them in the same social phylum with kiddie-porn producers, horse-dopers and assholes who use the phrase "sci-fi."

(Scaphism would be too light a fate for them.)

What this column
will
attempt to do, and I'll make a small start at it in just a bit—patience is a virtue—is explain the way the film and television industries work. To describe what it is like to work
in
the media, the psychological attitudes that prevail, the trends and endless imitative ripoffs therefrom, and—not to put too fine a point on it—service your seemingly-endless morbid curiosity about how The Industry functions, how films are made, why such crap gets on the tube, who make the decisions, and in general inform instead of insult your intelligence.

In answer to the initial questions . . .

Q: If you despise television so much, Ellison, why do you continue to work in the form?

Q: How do you write a script for movies or television?

Q: What's it like working in H*O*L*L*Y*W*O*O*D?

Q: What is Robert Blake
really
like?

 . . . I refer you (not out of venality or a desire to make even a farthing off you) to a 20,000 word essay titled "With the Eyes of Demon: Seeing the Fantastic as a Video Image" in
The Craft of Science Fiction
(edited by Reginald Bretnor; Harper & Row; 1976). Questions answered in that exhaustive essay will not be answered in this column.

Now. Having labored through all the preliminary bushwah one feels required to lay down, here is a sample of the service aspects of this column.

One of the most rigidly remembered templates for a series format in the minuscule minds of television network programmers and production company executives is
The Fugitive
. Devised by Roy Huggins in 1963, it reduced to the lowest possible common denominator all the elements that stunned TV watchers have come to demand from continuing series: a strong, harried protagonist with a "mission" (find the one-armed man who killed your wife, Dr. Richard Kimble), a "deadline" or "running clock" that puts urgency into the situation (clear your name of the murder before you are recaptured and get sent to the electric chair), a not-too-closely-examined reason to get from story to story each segment (you are running from the police), and something behind him that "pushes him forward" while the "mission" exerts its pull (Lt. Gerard is obsessively on your trail).

In its limited horizon thinking, each network has attempted to repeat the success of
The Fugitive
with dozens of cliché imitations of this format.
Run for Your Life, The Invaders, The Immortal, Quest, Then Came Bronson, Route 66, The Guns of Will Bonnett
, I'm sure you can think of fifty others on your own. With the tunnelvision that lies at the core of what is wrong with television programming, the networks and packagers who sell their wares
to
the networks are clearly much less interested in serving the commonweal, of uplifting the taste of viewers, and of being responsible to the people (who own the airwaves) than they are to getting David Janssen or an identifiable somatotype of Janssen back on the road.