0 Between the Buttons (1967)

(Requested by reader S.S.)

Between the Buttons falls in that trough of Rolling Stones albums between the original focus on rhythm and blues covers and the later turn as world's greatest rock 'n' roll band, from their most obvious period of aping Beatles moves, also known as "psychedelia." Generally I prefer Aftermath and on some days even Their Satanic Majesties Request. But it was good to revisit Buttons again and find something that sounds a lot to me now like Mick Jagger's first solo album—and a pretty good one too, full of inconsequential little songs about yesterday's papers, my obsession, my connections, who's been sleeping here, something happened to me yesterday, etc. Jagger's most foppish persona tends to be front and center, with the bluesy guitar impulses of Brian Jones and Keith Richards often retired well to the background. No covers either—all Jagger/Richards originals. Interestingly, Jagger claims now to still like only "Back Street Girl." But the album still sounds like a Jagger solo to me, with the student of economics way that it calculates and checks off, throwing high signs to the Beatles, Kinks, Who, drugs, preening fashion, and other usual suspects. Jones, perhaps at the beginning of his long slow fade, has traded in for vibraphone, recorder, saxophone, electric dulcimer, and oscillator, among other sounds he contributed. Busy busy. The main difference between the UK and US versions is the inclusion of a couple of big hits for the States album: "Ruby Tuesday" and "Let's Spend [the Night / Some Time, the latter at the famous special request of Ed Sullivan] Together." One of my favorites on Buttons, perhaps because it's relatively strange and fresh to me, was not on the US version: "Please Go Home," which revs up a real nice head. It's altogether tempting to dismiss Between the Buttons as a badly aging sellout, but that's a little silly. From 1965 to maybe 1968 (before going on to deathless editions of classic rock), Jagger and Richards turned out to be first-rate masters of pop songcraft, among the very best, and Between the Buttons is basically a collection of experiments, with varying results and no US hits on the Brit version. As I said I'm more for Aftermath, not least for the one-on-one between signature long album side closers: "Goin' Home" (a brief obsession I still adore when I think to play it) vs. "Something Happened to Me Yesterday," which sounds vain, coy, smug, with (uncredited) brass section—of a piece indeed with Bob Dylan's bawdy "Rainy Day Women," another song I don't like nearly as much as I think I should. It's not really psychedelic, for one thing. I might have benefited from knowing "Something Happened" when I first got into psychedelics. But I didn't, so it's "Tuesday Afternoon" and "Itchycoo Park" that still sound the better and more mysteriously meaningful to me that way. Between the Buttons is essential, of course, because it's the Stones of the period, but it's ultimately in the minor key in every way.

Detail: Between the Buttons (1967)

0 James Brown, "I Can't Stand Myself (When You Touch Me)" (1967)

Dec. 30. 1967, #28
(listen)

The first thing that really intrigued me about this minor '60s James Brown hit is the strange title (in a series of them, a continuing JB specialty, see also "Get Up [I Feel Like Being Like a] Sex Machine"). The way he sings the song, and the way it's typically understood, is the more familiar "I Can't Stand It," meaning that he is overwhelmed by the feeling, presumably sexual. In the verses, at the same time, he goes into more detail about what he can't stand: "your love" (repeatedly), as well as "myself" (per title). Still, the overwhelming sentiment of the song remains not some puritanical rejection of sex but more the usual Freudian / Oedipal / whatnot fear of a woman's sexuality and/or commitment in general. I did not know until very recently that the song is fruit of a collaboration with a white rock band, the Dapps, who acquit themselves all right, though now that I know that I stubbornly hear the song as somewhat "less than" the rest of Brown's catalog in terms of the band. It's interesting and suggestive that the single release was mechanically sped up. I don't know other versions well enough to discern any chipmunk effect in it but I guess it might be there for those who know the song really well. All credit, as usual, goes to Foundations of Funk, Make it Funky, and especially the Star Time box, which introduced me to these deeper levels of Brown's work. He was as restless and searching as anyone in the '60s (and beyond), which is heard here as elsewhere and further confirmed by the experiment with a white rock band, the production manipulations, and a strange penetrating lyric that very nearly makes profound sense in spite of itself.

Detail: James Brown, "I Can't Stand Myself (When You Touch Me)" (1967)

0 Wait Until Dark (1967)

USA, 108 minutes
Director: Terence Young
Writers: Frederick Knott, Robert Carrington, Jane-Howard Carrington
Photography: Charles Lang
Music: Henry Mancini
Editor: Gene Milford
Cast: Audrey Hepburn, Alan Arkin, Richard Crenna, Efrem Zimbalist Jr., Jack Weston, Robby Benson, Julie Herrod, Samantha Jones

A star vehicle based on a stage production and arguably a by-the-numbers thriller of the day, Wait Until Dark made a lot of money but tends to get lost in the glare of an especially historic year for film, which saw releases of Bonnie and Clyde, Dont Look Back, The Graduate, Guess Who's Coming to Dinner, and Play Time, among others. Those movies are a big deal. Wait Until Dark is more of a small-scale deal—a sentimental pick on my part, perhaps. It is one of the first movies I saw without parental accompaniment, a memorable experience because one of those old school gimmicks was involved: No one was allowed entrance during the last 30 minutes, at which point all the house lights of the theater were turned off (against public regulations, I might add) during a key scene.

The formidably glamorous Audrey Hepburn was already established as an archetype of the "manic pixie dream girl" and here she carries on, playing Susy Hendrix, a woman adapting to total blindness after she has recently lost her sight in a fiery car wreck. "Do I have to be the world champion blind lady?" she chirps playfully more than once, the very image of pluck. Set in downtown New York City, the movie has unmistakable connections to a contemporary TV series, That Girl. Susy's version of Ann Marie's "Donald," her husband Sam, is played by Efrem Zimbalist Jr., who also has a TV way about him (The F.B.I.). Director Terence Young is best known for making early James Bond pictures—Dr. No, From Russia With Love, and Thunderball—and the experience serves this picture well, as it slips easily into creepy spy thriller / action mode, with eerie discordant music and a screenplay that plunges us into all kinds of mysterious ongoing nefarious activity. We barely have time to catch a breath, as the saying goes. Some potential spoilers ahead.



It is very much an Alfred Hitchcock tale, complete with MacGuffin in the form of a doll stuffed with heroin for purposes of smuggling and a "wrong man" scenario. Susy Hendrix is the "wrong man" (not to mention a version of the Hitchcock blonde) as she and Sam have come into possession of the doll, unknowing of its significance. When Sam has to travel for business, the bad guys show up at the Hendrix apartment looking for the doll, and soon enough one thing leads to another. The origins of Wait Until Dark as a stage production remain transparent, as the vast majority of action is centered in the Hendrix apartment, with the bad guys first attempting a kind of elaborate sting on Susy before progressing to the harder stuff. It is reminiscent in certain ways of a movie with a similar premise, based on a radio theater production, 1948's Sorry, Wrong Number.

Chief bad guy is a man named Roat, played with zest by a grandstanding, youthful Alan Arkin, who has something of a showcase role here and is well up to it. It verges on silly the way it is written, and Roat's cool sadistic side is almost comical caricature too, but never mind. The story moves quickly enough to obscure such flaws, and Arkin even at his most ridiculous retains a coiled power that is always a little unnerving. He still looks bad now, and he was a terrifying monster in the '60s. Richard Crenna and Jack Weston (more faces familiar from TV) are Roat's half-witted henchmen, coerced by him into the deal, and they are fine too.

It's a good premise, with first the unfolding sting, designed to prompt Susy to give up the doll in the spirit of a sincere misunderstanding, and then the vulnerability of the blind woman fully exploited. In the ingenious climax she is able to turn that very vulnerability against her tormentors. Susy only gradually realizes that the people coming to her door and calling her on the phone are not who they say they are, and the more she comes to understand that, in separate revelations, the more serious and worrisome the action becomes. The movie's best moments are at those points of understanding, when it is the best kind of chamber play and movie both, close and intimate and nerve-wracking.

Another movie it reminds me of is Marathon Man, also a gritty New York thriller with memorable musical moods, especially as it descends into a savage cat and mouse game for life and death. In Wait Until Dark, to defend herself, finally understanding her terrible jeopardy, Susy roams the apartment smashing all the light bulbs. Much of the rest of the movie occurs on a black screen (though she does forget one light bulb)—this was also the point when house lights were turned off in the theater.

While it remains stagy, Wait Until Dark is nimble and pointed, with lots of surprises and nice moments, wisely riding along on the powers of the original play when it has to. Audrey Hepburn is more star than player, but she's good enough at the physical mannerisms of a blind person. If her extreme cheer seems shallow, it comes to occupy more terrifying dimensions when the limits of her will to survive are revealed. Her persistent chipper way seems something else entirely then—steely if not pathological, reverting to her Holly Golightly persona. Arkin takes his stunt turns and everybody else knows to hit their marks from TV productions. So it goes like clockwork and the result is a nice little thriller. Too bad there will never again be a theater that turns off its house lights entirely for the end. [/nostalgia]

Top 10 of 1967
1. Wait Until Dark
2. The Graduate
3. Dont Look Back
4. Bonnie and Clyde
5. Play Time
6. In Cold Blood
7. La Collectionneuse
8. Cool Hand Luke
9. In the Heat of the Night
10. Point Blank

Detail: Wait Until Dark (1967)

0 Play Time (1967)

France / Italy, 124 minutes
Director: Jacques Tati
Writers: Art Buchwald, Jacques Lagrange, Jacques Tati
Photography: Jean Badal, Andreas Winding
Music: Francis Lemarque
Editor: Gerard Pollicand
Cast: Jacques Tati, Barbara Dennek, Jacqueline Lecomte, Henri Piccoli, Michel Francini, Georges Montant

With Play Time, we find yet another highly lauded movie from the big list at They Shoot Pictures Don't They? with yet another unfortunate air of failure (thinking also of Vertigo, Metropolis, The Magnificent Ambersons, etc.). Director and co-writer Jacques Tati bankrupted himself on the most expensive movie ever made in France to that point, and then it never came close to making back its money. It's not hard to see where it went. The picture is shot in 70 mm (which is how it should properly be seen, though I haven't managed it myself yet) and features giant complicated sets, so imposing that collectively they came to be known as "Tativille" during the shoot.

Full disclosure: The first time I saw Play Time it left me cold—I knew my TV screen was too small and blurry to really do it justice but it seemed so aimless and dry I couldn't imagine a big size rescuing it. But maybe this is a movie that should always get a second chance, because the next time, more recently, I was charmed, often floored, and even laughing aloud at some of the goings-on. Until that point I had classified it as a comedy that was humorous and light-hearted but not actually funny. Now I see it as almost mordant, so dim is its view of the modern condition (for lack of a better phrase), and often wickedly funny in that context.



Tati is one of a kind—and may even be fairly classified as an acquired taste—but his sources go directly to the film comedians  of silent pictures and early talkies. He continually throws up giant canvases and moves people and things across and around them, here using tourists in groups and buses and glass and square angles to erect his vision of a sterile modern world of skyscrapers, concrete, and suffocating urban geometry.

He had already established his own comic persona so well by then, in the figure of M. Hulot, that when he first appears—in the back half of a long shot from above (deep focus is often the mode in Play Time)—we recognize him instantly, his figure, his gait, his hat and pipe and coat. As it happens, by the time of Play Time Tati was tired of Hulot and thinking of retiring him, and so he plays much to the side of the action, swamped by the surging tides of modernity. At the same time, Tati decked out any number of other players in his hat and pipe and coat. The specter of M. Hulot thus becomes constant and a little nagging, which only fortifies the comic potential.

Part of the charm of this movie indeed is the vast distance it takes for its point of view, so remote as to be godlike. Most of the dialogue is incidental and as if overheard, an undertow of murmuring voices, merely a coequal counterpart to the constant hum of machines and drone of auto engines and traffic. Play Time drifts from an opening sequence at the Paris airport to scenes of a giant downtown office building, a trade show, apartment living at night, and finally climaxes in an extended scene in a nightclub—all told, brooding over a 24-hour period, morning to morning (with a luscious and pungent coda of mid-morning traffic wheeling slowly around roundabouts).

Hulot seen darting about at the sidelines is the one constant, along with a steady stream of small-scale sight gags and visual puns: a small room off a building lobby becomes an elevator, a ruined pedestal of a Roman / Greek pillar turns out to be a trash receptacle. Open and closed glass doorways and walls continually fool us and the people in the movie. Lamps and lights appear in strange places, often switched on and casting weird shadows. Nothing is exactly as it appears to be, except insofar as everything appears to be soulless.

Maybe this is obvious, but I take the title to mean something on the order of "goofing" or "riffing." Tati (who reminds me a little of James Stewart here, tall and shambling and amiable) enters a world he plainly derides as made up of equal parts drudgery and stupidity, and he plays. The deadening qualities of modernity are exaggerated—the apartment building offers its residents absurdly unprivate living, for example, with full-wall plate glass windows facing over the street. Seen from the street side by side and atop one another they are like television screens, and in each one there is a show going on (at one point involving all watching TV).

Behind all the sour view there is a good heart. Here's the tell. The movie is needlessly charming, charming for its own sake, with wonderfully warm music and humor, undercutting the general tone of disapproval. In one very funny sequence, a drugstore cafeteria in the middle of the night is lit by a buzzing green neon sign so bright everyone in there looks ill (it also looks in that moment like the famous green scene in Vertigo). Hulot vainly attempts in the sickly light to determine whether any of the food is actually edible, peering closely at it and smelling it, and finally decides he's not that hungry after all.

It's a very quiet movie but that is somewhat deceptive. The centerpiece is the long and elaborate scene in the chic new nightclub / restaurant, which builds up to a remarkable head of steam. It starts in early evening, as people are only beginning to filter in, works abundant gags over the fact that the place is newly designed and built and still has many flaws and problems, and eventually builds to a crashing crescendo as sections of the venue collapse entirely with the dance floor fully packed and people still waiting in line for a table. At one point the music performed at the club changes from '60s-era lounge to bop and the pace picks up accordingly. As the place itself falls apart the music has been reduced to drumming and a percussive discordant organ keyboard, but the dance floor is more packed than ever. "It's the same thing every night," says a bored patron as she leaves.

At about that point I realized how much I love Play Time. It's strange and wonderful, daffy and acerbic, a treat on practically every level of cinema: visual, sound, and, yes, even narrative, once you get the hang of what it's doing. I really hope I get to see it on the big screen one of these days.

Detail: Play Time (1967)

0 Ten Years After, "Adventures of a Young Organ" (1967)

(listen)

Fun facts about Ten Years After (things I did not know dept.): The band stretches all the way back to 1960, with guitar player Alvin Lee (who died earlier this year) and bass player Leo Lyons putting together an act called Ivan Jay & the Jaycats. The outfit then went through several name changes (and some personnel adjustments) before settling on Ten Years After in 1966, which was in honor of Elvis Presley's banner year. I knew them first and chiefly as practitioners of acid-rock because of their Woodstock performance of "I'm Going Home," with Alvin Lee's famously impossible speedy play. This is how most people knew them at the time, I'm pretty sure, and many of the albums (spotty, to me, all of them) played more or less explicitly to that. But the first, self-titled album is something else altogether, showcasing a band that is much closer to a jazz unit. "Adventures of a Young Organ" is as good an example as any, a brief song by Lee and organ player Chick Churchill with heavy intimations of Jimmy Smith and other Hammond-style players. Yes, they were already looking to their blues-rock future on that album too, with a cover of Willie Dixon's "Spoonful" and a 10-minute workup on a song with another Willie Dixon songwriting credit, "Help Me." But it's this cleaned-up bluesy-jazzy bent that I liked best about it and it's still my favorite album by them—the only one I like without reservation. Others have played this type of music better (I already mentioned Jimmy Smith) but something about the way it flouted my expectations ultimately made me very fond of it, with this song as its basic model.

Detail: Ten Years After, "Adventures of a Young Organ" (1967)