Envy

Ben Stiller

I was not even aware that Barry Levinson's Envy existed until I stumbled upon a DVD of the film at my local library. Apparently, this 2004 film was such an ignominious flop that it left not a trace on the public consciousness. The two major film companies responsible for its financing had so little faith in it after its box office demise that it never had a release on disc until Shout Factory, champions of pop culture errata, snapped it up. I decided to give it a chance based on the cast alone: Ben Stiller, Jack Black, Rachel Weisz, Amy Poehler, and Christopher Walken. Alas, the film is direly unfunny. Stiller and Black play SoCal neighbors who work at unfulfilling jobs at a 3M plant. Weisz and Poehler are underutilized as "the wives". Black invents an aerosol spray that eliminates animal waste dubbed Vapoorize. That is the level of the humor. The film's primary focus is on Stiller's resentment over his friend's success. 

There are moments of humor, but they are few and far between. Walken fares best because he is well cast as an eccentric barfly. Black is underused. The only moment that captures his comic energy is an infomercial in which he pitches his product. Stiller is really the lead here. Leon Redbone contributes a song cycle reminiscent of Jonathan Richman's efforts in There's Something About Mary, but comic lightning did not strike twice. Stiller has a good moment telling off his boss, but pratfalls and physical schtick, which the Farrelly brothers handled well in ...Mary, are not Barry Levinson's forte. He is more adept at verbal comedy linked to characterization and characterization is extremely thin in Envy. Stiller and Levinson's attempts to milk physical comedy from a dead horse flop badly. It seems to me when Levinson ventures outside his native Baltimore, the results have been feeble. Avoid Envy.

A Woman of the World

                       Pola Negri and Chester Conklin                    

Malcolm St. Clair's A Woman of the World, released in 1925, is an amusing fish out of water trifle than runs only 70 minutes. The Tubi stream is only so-so in terms of visual fidelity and sharpness, a pity since Bert Glennon (The Scarlet Empress, Stagecoach) manned the camera, but it still gives us a chance to see a relatively neglected silent. The film was based on Carl Van Vechten's recent novel, The Tattooed Countess. Tasked with turning this into a vehicle for one of Paramount's big stars, Pola Negri, screenwriter Pierre Collings dropped the age of the Countess by two decades and, thankfully, retained her tattoo. Morrie Ryskind was responsible for the intertitles which sardonically lampoons the narrow mindedness of the Babbitts and Babettes of small town America.

The film opens with a prologue on the Riviera in which Negri finds her husband, a no account count, in flagrante delicto. To get away from her troubles, Pola travels to America to visit his long lost cousin, who turns out to be...Chester Conklin(?!). Conklin, five years removed from Mack Sennett, was still the best second banana in the business and his rapport with Negri is priceless. His character, like all of the men in the film's fictional town of Maple Valley, is suspicious of her foreign ways, but becomes a puddle in her presence. The scene in which he reveals his own tattoo to Negri is priceless. The exoticism of Negri unleashes neurotic and erotic currents in Maple Valley. Two men fall in love with her, the most significant being the local DA (Holmes Herbert), a bluenose with a fanatical zeal for reform. They meet cute when he calls her a loose woman, she is smoking a cigarette after all, and he tells her to leave town. The road to true love is rocky and not helped by the local gossip mongers busy knitting on their porches. Pola ends up confronting the DA at a city council meeting brandishing a whip for a finale that inevitably leads to a clinch and a just married sign. 

Pola Negri: bangs were big in the flapper era

Malcolm St. Clair's career, like Ms. Negri's, nosedived in the sound era. His direction here is simple and elegant, his focus more on actorly byplay than panoramas. He rarely moves his camera and seems fond of close-ups of telling details: hands and balls of yarn. The one pan in the film tracks a bit of gossip as it goes from one end of the room to the other. Negri is playful and game. She suggests a real woman behind the guise of a vamp. I never have cared for Holmes Herbert, too much of a throwback to the 19th century for me, but he fits his uptight role. Charles Emmett Mack plays a younger admirer, the kind leading ladies of the day ultimately reject because they are only a boy. He is promising, but died, prematurely and tragically in an auto accident in 1927. All in all though, A Woman of the World is a delight.

Magical Mystery Tour versus The White Bus

Fab Four gone flab

I first saw The Beatles' Magical Mystery Tour in 1978 or so, a scratchy and wan print at a midnight showing. After seeing the similar tour bus driven The White Bus, also originally released in 1967, I thought to give it a another chance. Was it still the witless psychedelic farrago that I remembered? Alas, yes. I guess it was too much to expect that the pop music darlings of that age could make an interesting film, but did they even try? The project seems hastily conceived and shot. Phantasmagoric moments as the bus tours the English countryside are interspersed with amateurish videos of the band's new material. The music, except for the truly mad I Am the Walrus, is subpar Fabs; the barrel scrapings of their psychedelic era. The only thing I can say positive about the film is that it is a link from The Goon Show to Monty Python. At least the band had good taste in genuine English eccentrics like Ivor Cutler and the Bonzo Dog Doo-Dah Band.

Lindsay Anderson's The White Bus mines a similar vein of English eccentricism in glorious black and white. The Beatles' film had been inspired by Ken Kesey's adventures with his busload of merry pranksters. No such foreign or lysergic influence pervades Anderson's film. The short, 47 minutes, film was made to be part of a portmanteau project that would also include short films by Tony Richardson and Karl Reisz that would prove not to be. Shot in 1965, The White Bus had a brief release in 1967, but has languished in obscurity since. The film was written by Shelaugh Delaney, edited by Kevin Brownlow, and stars Patricia Healey. Healey plays a depressed London clerk working in a Brutalist building who embarks upon a train ride in a very gray London. The unnamed she gets hit on by a bowler caricature of an aristo, but cheers up when entertained by the antics of a cadre of Manchester United fans. The group sing-a-long is more winning and better shot than the one in The Beatles' flick.

Patricia Healey

The gal disembarks in Manchester which looks even more sooty and sinister than London. Happily, a double decker tour bus happens by and our heroine hops on. The passengers are a mix of English types, international travelers, and the Lord Mayor and his Macebearer, both dressed in full regalia. The characterizations are less exaggerated than in Magical Mystery Tour and the whole enterprise looks great, probably at the cost of The Beatles' catering budget. The groups tours industrial sites, museums, gardens, weaving centers, cake factories and witness Anthony Hopkins sings, very briefly, Resolution der Kommunarden, a Brecht poem about the Paris Commune of 1871 set to music by fellow traveler Hans Eisler. The picture occaisionally explodes in sequences of color, as in Anderson's If..., but nothing should be read into this. Anderson admitted he did so in desperation. He would use whatever precious film that was gifted to him by hook or crook. The film addresses alienation from a secure distance. Anderson pokes fun at English nationalism, class strictures, and the Church: all safe and easy targets. The Manchester buildings still bombed out from the Second World War leave more of an impact on the mind's eye.

Despite its limitations, The White Bus, especially in comparison to Magical Mystery Tour, is a coherent and realized picture from a director with a true filmmaker's eye. Ms. Healey had a haphazard film career, including two cameos in subsequent Anderson films, but earned a moniker that many would envy, Mrs. Englebert Humperdinck. They were wed from 1964 till her death in 2021.

In memory of Erich Kuersten