0 Van McCoy, "The Hustle" (1975)

May 31, 1975, #1
(listen)

When Whit Stillman makes fun of dance crazes this has to be factored in too. I can't speak with any authority, of course, but I suspect the line dance known as "the Hustle" is not so far removed from "the Twist"—that is, essentially individualized writhing on a dance floor to groovy prerecorded music, with coordinated moves and gestures included or dispensed with as seen fit. At any rate it doesn't matter at all for my purposes. For something so universally reviled in its time, not to mention a one-time #1 hit across the land, Van McCoy's "The Hustle" seems to have slid away remarkably far into obscurity, especially when one considers that the issue at hand, disco music, in many ways remains as vital as ever—more so. "The Hustle" is very early disco, of course, commercial product more recognizable to me now as '70s Philly soul than disco (though McCoy is a D.C. native and it was recorded in New York City). You can hear how the arrangements, particularly the horn charts, were later utilized by the soundtrack artists such as David Shire working to the side of the Bee Gees in Saturday Night Fever, and you can even hear how the instrumental breaks sound like theme and bumper music from '70s game shows. Yet for all this heap of mediocrity the whole of it sounds transcendentally splendiferous to me to this moment, hitting its chirpy soaring marching doot-doots and deet-deets on the flute with wonderful pop economy and precision, a rainbow world of sweets and soft perfume extending to the horizon. I love living inside it and I hope Whit Stillman does a movie about it someday. Inspirational line: "Do it. Do the Hustle."

Detail: Van McCoy, "The Hustle" (1975)

0 Phoebe Snow, "Poetry Man" (1975)

April 8, 1975, #5
(listen)

I understand how telling it is that "Poetry Man" was a #1 hit on Billboard's easy listening (aka adult contemporary) chart before it ever crossed over and went to #5 on the big chart. But if this song is an example of bad taste I don't want to have good taste—I adored it even before I was an adult contemporary and I think it's easy listening without the judgment. If I am ever lucky enough to hear it on the radio it is a fine day. Those circumstances to date have seemed to be on the order of road trips or errands in rented cars, at strange times of day and night, on radio stations I will never hear again. It is one of the great wintertime hits, warm and wordy and gushing and tender. It's at least as enamored of the Beats as I ever could have been, swooning in its ladled-on visions of the literary art and its healing, redemptive powers. It's sweet as hell yet so much more than that yet always sweet again. The players are loose, freewheeling, and tentative, striking lovely notes, touching for and sliding around them, in concert with Snow's warbly delicate vocal style. It's from the best album she or nearly anyone else has ever made. It's meandering and sloppy yet never loses its way. The sadness is palpable even as it declares its joy, and by the time Zoot Sims uncorks his pure pro saxophone solo, riding a gentle stream of strings, the mood is rich with suggestion—about music, poetry, love, time, and stuff like that. "You're the poetry man," it says. "You make things all right."

Detail: Phoebe Snow, "Poetry Man" (1975)

0 Blood Relatives (1975)

Blood Relatives is still of the lean, compact variety of novel in the 87th Precinct series of police procedurals by Ed McBain (Evan Hunter, which was not his real name either), less than 200 pages as a mass market paperback, and thus, among other things, a very swift read indeed. Digressions and subplots are minimal, although I don't necessarily count that as a good thing in this series. Blood Relatives is focused on one main case, making it more of a conventional "mystery book," including a twist ending that makes the whole thing unfortunately not very believable and something of a dud. The case is about a pair of teen cousins who are brutally attacked on the street by a maniac with a knife. One survives with injuries and has a confused story to tell. It's a very unpleasant crime, detailed to a discomfiting degree. McBain is fascinated by knives, there's no disputing that, and this is one of the novels where it's right out there. The story eventually goes off the rails (in my opinion) but the fundamentals of the procedural are solid as usual. Steve Carella is front and center, with Meyer Meyer and Bert Kling just to the side, and as often happens in these shorties they are mostly just working the case. And that's fine too, if your tastes run to procedurals as do mine, because McBain is just plain one of the best. Not to be tiresome about it, but when the focus of procedurals shifted to labs and high-tech doohick from, you know, good old-fashioned shoe-leather police work, grinding away at putting together a picture, constructing a narrative if you will (which always incorporated lab work), well, that's when it lost me, as amazing as all that technology is. Again, see true-crime shows such as the Court TV / truTV gem, Forensic Files, for better entertainment values built out of the same materials. "Big case" single-episode TV dramas also more and more preclude the parallel streams of cases developing at the same time, which is one of my favorite aspects of them (again, Adam-12). But Blood Relatives is disappointing to me not just because it is limited to the one case, but also because that case has a number of significant problems, including perhaps worst a pompous sense of profundity. It's the usual gang from the 87th, but proceed with caution.

In case it's not at the library.

Detail: Blood Relatives (1975)

0 Nashville (1975)

USA, 159 minutes
Director: Robert Altman
Writer: Joan Tewkesbury
Photography: Paul Lohmann
Music: Arlene Barnett, Jonnie Barnett, Karen Black, Ronee Blakley, Gary Busey, Keith Carradine, Juan Grizzle, Henry Gibson, Allan F. Nicholls, Dave Peel, Joe Raposo
Editors: Dennis M. Hill, Sidney Levin
Cast: Ronee Blakley, Lily Tomlin, Keith Carradine, Michael Murphy, Henry Gibson, Keenan Wynn, Geraldine Chaplin, Gwen Welles, Ned Beatty, Karen Black, David Hayward, Shelly Duvall, Jeff Goldblum, Thomas Hal Phillips, Barbara Harris, Richard Baskin, David Arkin, Barbara Baxley, Elliott Gould, Julie Christie, Howard K. Smith, Steve Earle

Nashville has always seemed to me much larger and more generous than its rather narrow view of country music—a movie with ambitions of the white whale and designs on America (and/or "America") itself. Which only makes sense given its timing, made in the immediate aftermath of Vietnam 'n' Watergate, a time when cynicism naturally felt like sincerity. Straight ahead, a host of chambers of commerce were looking to the 1976 American Bicentennial for balm and healing, but no one else was. Nashville is here to explain some of the reasons why.

As a self-conscious Bicentennial checkpoint for director Robert Altman (and writer Joan Tewkesbury, and members of the very large cast, who improvised much of their dialogue and in many cases wrote their own country songs to sing), it tilted decidedly toward one side of today's stark national divide. It's full of mocking derision for the South, smug movie stars making cameos, elitist to its core, with adultery, casual sex, drugs, corruption, and celebrity culture. It was long, it was different, it was Important (with its famous sound design use of overlapping dialogue). It was suitably decorated with Oscar nominations and suitably denied most of the wins. Pauline Kael wrote a review for The New Yorker that was nearly as famous as the movie. It was emblem, fleeting icon, and prize in its time of what we've come to call Blue America. But over the years since it has become something else, or easier to see it for what it is.



In fact, watching it recently in a double feature with Goodfellas, I was impressed by how gentle and good-hearted Nashville is at its most bedrock levels. It represents a sensibility that can still be shocked by political assassination or the humiliation of a deluded singer with no talent. Altman's background in television serves him well with a light touch, punctuating his burbling, unfolding stream of scenes (largely shot in sequence) with deft setups, foreshadowing, rhyming themes, and comic set pieces. It's a banquet, basically. His huge cast of some two-dozen-odd enable him to isolate and match and mix unique elements. So, for example, we have the unnamed "tricycle man" (Jeff Goldblum), a hipster doofus in a floppy hat tooling around on a wacky motorcycle, playing various magic tricks, almost purely a visual element.

But the movie is a musical as much as anything and I'm sorry to say the music has worn least well about Nashville. It usually has enough charm to not slow things down much but is often about willfully misunderstanding country music. So we never miss the point, there's even one scene with a throwaway act in the background warbling, "Well, if makin' love were margarine / Then she is the high-priced spread." Ba da boom. The contempt is constant but even worse is when Nashville ham-handedly salutes a few figures, such as Vassar Clements, with the condescending air they are rare gems in an appalling wasteland. That Blue America thing again, I guess.

Yet the one part of Nashville I never tire of is the Barbara Jean (Ronee Blakley) thread, which is deeply musical and also where Altman lucked into something his movie needed more of: someone who not only understood the music, but was and is a pretty good songwriter and performer in her own right. I love the scene of her public breakdown not least because the first two songs she is able to get through ("Tapedeck in His Tractor" and "Dues") are so great. For that matter, so is the breakdown. It is riveting and poignant. Blakley pulls it off tentatively but completely for an amazing scene start to finish.

Another important and nicely worked out scene is nearly as musical, with Keith Carradine's performance of "I'm Easy," playing Tom Frank the womanizer. It's skin-crawling time as the gentle '70s country-rock song unspools and at least three women in the audience have reason to believe it involves them personally. Frank is an interesting element in the mix, a sourpuss rock 'n' roll guy whose music is anything but sourpuss rock 'n' roll (think Jackson Browne), an empty vessel of a human being, soulless, pathological, reprehensible, occasionally pitiable. "I'm Easy" is the perfect song for him. (On the matter of soulless, Karen Black as Connie White is the female analogue here.)

Nashville is a kaleidoscope ride, with flaws and bumps but a reassuring force to the narrative stream, so dense with detail that much is to be gained from multiple viewings, and it goes down easy, always with a friendly hello and smile. I love the way Altman and Tewkesbury make places and rituals the focal nodes of their large-scale structure. First there are the scenes at the airport, where many characters are simply coming and going on their business with others who have gathered to greet Barbara Jean's arrival. That is followed by a massive freeway pile-up. On Saturday night all the characters go out. On Sunday morning they all go to church—which characters go to which churches makes it one of my favorite sequences in the whole thing. (Once again Blakley steals the show, in a hospital chapel, singing "He Walks With Me." Goose bumps!)

That's the way it goes, lurching about, herding its cast through their rituals, and building to one of those Altman endings of great disaster, in this case an assassination, which may or may not have something important to say but certainly feels climactic. The key lyrical theme is rolled out big: "You may say that I ain't free / But it don't bother me." In recent viewings the political element—the campaign of Hal Phillip Walker, a third-party "Replacement Party" candidate for president, conducted via ubiquitous van with loudspeakers droning things like, "When you pay more for an automobile than it cost Columbus to make his first voyage to America, that's politics"—has more and more taken center stage for me. The random stupidity and undertone of malevolence in these blandishments feel chillingly prescient, although they are often funny. "You ever ask a lawyer the time of day?" the voice intones, making the case for eliminating all lawyers from the U.S. Congress. "He told you how to make a watch, didn't he?"

And more, with Nashville there is always more: Keenan Wynn's face, the galling stupidity of Opal from the BBC, Sueleen Gay's zen-like lack of self-awareness, Frog in the background constantly, Michael Murphy's smarm, Shelley Duvall as L.A. Joan ("she's from California," the constant refrain), Haven Hamilton (Henry Gibson), pompous buffoon, and Linnea (Lily Tomlin), perhaps the single most interesting character here of all, a gospel singer, a devoted mother, an adultress. And more. See it, see it again, and then see it again.

Which reminds me of the editing, and the earlier, longer versions, and the lost footage. I'd rather forget that, but on the bright side, I do think the editing is a high point in Nashville, sorting out the many characters, keeping them distinct, and making all their stories more or less coherent as it plows relentlessly on.

Top 10 of 1975
1. Nashville
2. Love and Death
3. Barry Lyndon
4. Picnic at Hanging Rock
5. Swept Away
6. Welfare
7. Dog Day Afternoon
8. Monty Python and the Holy Grail
9. The Passenger
10. The Mirror

Detail: Nashville (1975)

0 The Mirror (1975)

Zerkalo, USSR, 108 minutes
Director: Andrei Tarkovksy
Writers: Aleksandr Misharin, Andrei Tarkovsky, Arseni Tarkovsky
Photography: Georgi Rerberg
Music: Eduard Artemev
Editor: Lyudmila Feiginova
Cast: Margarita Terekhova, Innokenti Smoktunovsky, Larisa Tarkovskaya, Oleg Yankovsky, Ignat Daniltsev, Anatoli Solonitsin, Alla Demidova, Arseni Tarkovsky

By all I can tell, The Mirror was shot and first released in the USSR (under heavy official sanction, which prevented it from entry into Cannes) and then made its way slowly across the world—the first screening in the U.S. was 1983, according to IMDb—approximately during the period when I was busy attending revival house and art film theater series, taking film appreciation classes, and thinking a lot about movies. Yet even the name was plain unfamiliar to me many years later when I ran across it in a list of Greatest Films You Must See or some such. I shoveled The Mirror on in to my Netflix queue, along with two more highly regarded Tarkovsky pictures I knew only dimly, Andrei Rublev and Ivan's Childhood.

In retrospect, I think I can see how Andrei Rublev could become for some what I found in, say, The Mother and the Whore or Berlin Alexanderplatz: a vast, bewildering, disorienting film unlike any other, certainly unlike anything before it, and profoundly formative somehow. By comparison, The Mirror is more chamber suite, moderated by the focused scope and intimacies of autobiography. No surprise, it requires patience, and probably some previously existing predisposition toward director/co-writer Andrei Tarkovsky's work. Few filmmakers seem to me as capable of exploiting the daunting levels of complexity the medium can accommodate. But the slipperiness of the narrative handholds are frustrating. Yet there it sits at #27 on the big list at They Shoot Pictures, Don't They?



Well, it's not hard to see whose film-critical star is on the rise. The Mirror made it to the top 30 up from #67 last year, while Andrei Rublev is up to #22 from #42, and Stalker is up to #54 from #117. Three films by one director in that top 50 is the kind of thing achieved by figures such as Federico Fellini, Alfred Hitchcock, and Orson Welles, and them not always, which speaks volumes to the burgeoning esteem for Tarkovsky.

The Mirror is a lush overheated swamp of a filmmaking laboratory. How many types of film stock are used here? There are scenes in black and white, sepia, and multiple color tones, plus generous portions of historical documentary and newsreel footage. In a page from Persona, deliberate bad filmmaking techniques—boom shadows in frame, chopped-up cuts, and distracting cue marks (those dots in the upper right corner that signal projectionists)—are used at will, elaborately insisting on reminders of the medium. It feels like there ought to be a schema, such as in the shifts between black and white and color, but looking carefully I'm damned if I can make one out. The dreamier, hallucinatory sequences are in both black and white and color. So are the explicit memories. So are the present-day scenes, which modulate into harrowing, convincing, and oddly riveting relationship dynamics. So are scenes that seem to be advancing a narrative, however anecdotally. If anything, the shifts between black and white and color are like rhythms of nature, pounding waves, vibration, shifting across the tonal planes of this movie.

It is dense—often the visuals and audio are telling us two separate things at once. It includes voiceover narration by Tarkovsky's father Arseni, reading his own poetry. The omnipresent center of this film is actually not easy to find. I take it as autobiographical because that's what I've read, and that's what makes the most sense as a frame, though it's very generalized. We experience it from a deeply internalized place, rarely seeing the evident author (son and husband) in the present day, only as if glimpsed in mirrors, though the stream of his thought and speech is a constant. In many ways, it is how we experience ourselves, a body only occasionally seen and a voice constantly heard.

As pure filmmaker, Tarkovsky is capable of amazing technical feats. The complexity of his setups, and how well suited they are to the mood of the story (such as it is), are what make this for me. Early on, for example, there is a long tracking shot that starts from the dark interior of a country house, watches two children hurry from the breakfast table to see a calamity, stops and lingers on a mirror that reflects the backs of the children and our first tiny glimpse of a barn on fire, and then tracks out of the house and into a long wide exterior from under the eaves of a porch. Tarkovsky is good with buildings engulfed in flames, as he also demonstrated in The Sacrifice. He is also very good with simple and elusive things others rarely think of, or use poorly, such as wind. He is remarkably good with wind. He is remarkably good.

There are many scenes and images of great power strewn across The Mirror. Margarita Terekhova delivers a bravura performance, playing both the mother and wife. The picture possesses flourishes of magic realism, a risky stock in trade, but managed well. That means levitation among other things. The mushroom cloud makes an appearance, which arguably belongs in the autobiography of anyone alive since 1945. The implicit comparisons and refractions of memory and mirrors effectively layer on more complexity. The placid sense of revery often surprises. Everything feels thought through somehow, even as the ends seem to elude one. As with a good short-story anthology, the sum is not necessarily greater than the parts. But the parts indeed can be very great.

Detail: The Mirror (1975)