TEN FROM YOUR SHOW OF SHOWS - Review By Greg Klymkiw - TJFF 2014 - Toronto Jewish Film Festival 2014

Ten From Your Show of Shows (1973) *****
Dir. Max Liebman, Prod. Pat Weaver, Writers: Mel Brooks, Neil Simon, Carl Reiner
Starring: Sid Caesar, Imogene Coca, Carl Reiner, Howard Morris

Review By Greg Klymkiw

To coin a phrase from the title of Alan Zweig's recent documentary masterpiece, be prepared to experience - beyond all your wildest hopes and dreams - a time when Jews were funny. I mean funny!!! Really, really funny.

If there is anything on television today that's even a pubic hair as brilliant as Your Show of Shows, I'd like to know what it is. Watching this 1973 feature length compilation of ten classic sketches from the immortal variety series that aired on NBC from 1950-1954, I was delightfully transported to a time and place when comedians could have you in stitches just by appearing on-screen - completely in character and bearing the gait and posture that offered a mere taste of the hilarity to come. Each sketch is a perfectly crafted gem with a solid narrative coat hanger by which to display gags of the highest order and performed with the kind of chemistry and zeal that seems so lacking in contemporary comedy. These were giants, kings and gods of the universe of laughter.

Astonishingly, the show was performed in a real theatre, with a real audience and broadcast LIVE to the world and even more amazing is that the company of actors NEVER ad-libbed - they stuck completely to the brilliant scripts and meticulous choreography of both the basic blocking and the kind of slapstick that modern comedians can only dream of being able to pull off.

Much of this is attributable to the direction of Max Liebman, a pioneer of live television comedy who knew that the very best way to capture the material was to use the camera like a closeup proscenium and most of all, to place a great deal of emphasis on rehearsal to nail every dramatic and comic beat with perfection and to ensure that the performers hit their marks perfectly - after all, when the show is going out live to millions, there are NO second chances. Liebman is, in some ways, the real unsung genius of contemporary screen comedy. He not only directed the precursor to "Your Show of Shows" (a ninety-minute two part live broadcast with Jack Carter in Chicago and Caesar, Coca and Reiner in New York), but he spent eons producing live comedy and variety reviews in the Poconos where he cut his teeth on sketch comedy that demanded perfection.

Though the cast features an excellent array of many regular performers and guest stars, the quartet who led the Show of Shows charge were Sid Caesar, always taking the skewed leading man role, the leggy plasticine-faced Imogene Coca in the equally skewed leading lady roles, the deadpan, pole-up-the-butt Carl Reiner always an authority figure and last, but not least, the genius that was Howard Morris who could do just about anything (and did).

The collection of sketches provided here is no mixed bag of nuts in terms of quality - each and every one is a scrumptious morsel and these rich comic comestibles are beautifully assembled to provide a perfect arc of laughs from beginning to end, but also offer-up the sort of amazing scope of material that this team of artisans attacked.

I'll describe three sketches to give you a sense of what you're in for.

The first sketch in the compilation is a lovely sampling of a simple two-hander where we learn that wifey Coca has ploughed the family car through the front window of a liquor store. When hubby Caesar gets home from a hard day on Madison Avenue, Coca needs to do everything in her power to keep hubby from driving the car, but to also test the waters as to just how furious he's going to be when he hears the news. At one point, she goes so far as to recount the accident in a third person narrative to see how hubby reacts. Caesar hilariously laughs off the tale of woe, commiserating with the poor schmuck who is, no doubt, smarting over the knowledge that he let his dumb wife actually drive the car.

Uh-oh.

Hilarity ensues even more at this point, though the tale offers up an extremely satisfying and touching conclusion.

The centrepiece sketch is one of the earliest examples of a movie parody, a brilliant spoof of Fred Zinneman's adaptation of James Jones's From Here To Eternity with Carl Reiner hilariously pinning a row of medals into Sid Caesar's flesh, a magnificent USO dance-club scene that offers-up Caesar and Reiner's rivalry over dime-a-dance gal Coca and during the rendition of the famous beach scene, Caesar shows up in a rubber ducky tube around his waist and once he and Coca settle in for some amore, they're repeatedly interrupted by bucket loads of water splashed in their faces. (Oh, and I'm just guessing here, but chances are good that most of this sketch was written by head writer Mel Brooks, cinema's king of movie parodies like Blazing Saddles and Young Frankenstein.)

The concluding sketch is pure slapstick genius. It's a parody of the Ralph Edwards program "This is Your Life" which gives us a healthy glimpse at the huge theatre and audience assembled for the live broadcast by including a big scene offstage and on the orchestra floor, but also provides a marvellous all-you-can-eat offering of the magnificent Howard Morris and his unbelievably insane ability to render physical comedy. In this case, he's so monkey-like that he gives the overrated Planet of the Apes reboot star Andy Serkis a major run for his money. Morris doesn't need CGI - the guy simply transforms into a variety of simian poses in the unlikeliest of settings.

These then are but three of ten great sketches and I can't think of a single one that doesn't offer up huge laughs. One sketch is presented in silent movie pantomime style, another offers the quartet as clock pieces on a German clock that's just not working, another is a two hander with Caesar and Morris as the most rigid, pole-up-the-butt Germans imaginable, another involving Morris wagging a huge dill pickle in front of a very hungry Sid Caesar's face - the list goes on. Laughs galore.

I remember first seeing this compilation when it played first-run at a movie theatre in Winnipeg. I was maybe 13 or 14 years old and I still remember the great feeling of being in a cinema in the North End seeing this work for the first time, rolling on the floor with laughter and surrounded by mostly older people who seemed to be laughing so loud that in retrospect, (this was long before the advent of "Depends") I now wonder just how many of them were able to control their bladders. My recent helping of Ten From Your Show Of Shows certainly provided my own bladder with challenges, so anyone planning to catch the TJFF screening of this great 90 minutes of pure hilarity would be best advised to, shall we say, come prepared for any expulsions triggered by laughter.

As live television during the Golden Age proved time and time again, anything was possible.

Ten From Your Show Of Shows plays the Toronto Jewish Film Festival (TJFF) 2014. For fix and info visit their website HERE.

SUMMER INTERLUDE - Reviewed By Greg Klymkiw - Criterion CollectionBlu-Ray

Ingmar Bergman's passionate, heartbreaking tale of young love is quiet and delicate. Beneath the calm and warmth of a gentle summer, a heart waits to be broken while another turns to stone.

Summer Interlude (1951) ****
dir. Ingmar Bergman
Starring: Maj-Britt Nilsson, Birger Malmsten, Alf Kjellin, Georg Funkquist

Review By Greg Klymkiw

"He was very fond of me and he was such a gentle boy. We used to go out together, walking . . . like the way they do in the country. . . O, the day I heard that, that he was dead!"
-Greta, The Dead by James Joyce

"Isn't that what love is, using people? Maybe that's what hate is--not being able to use people."
-Catherine, Suddenly Last Summer by Tennessee Williams

Sprinkled amidst the ups and downs of life, we encounter distinct periods of time that place the forward movements of our existence on pause. These interludes feel distinct from everything on either side of their beginning and end. They're often pleasant, relaxed or quietly pensive - allowing for reflection upon what has transpired and and consideration of what's to come. This is not to say the interludes are without actions which place the normal course of events in a sort of holding pattern, yet are in and of themselves representative of movements ever-advancing.

The same can apply even to interludes within the context of live performances of music, theatre or even in the early days of television when used as placeholders between regular programming during technical glitches or when there simply was nothing else to broadcast. That said, the events within the interlude are, more often than not, marked by actions decidedly different from what feels like the normal course of events. They're a transition period that allows growth (or stunting) to occur. They appear in individual lives as well as collective movements in world history; from the all-encompassing down to micro-and-macroscopic) progressions.

As a film, Summer Interlude is a sort of transitional moment in the career of Ingmar Bergman, perhaps the most influential filmmaker in all of film history. Bergman was 33-years-old when the film was released (the same year, amusingly, as Christ's crucifixion and, more importantly His resurrection). Bergman had already been working in cinema as a screenwriter (a damn fine one, at that) and had directed a few "gun for hire" items. This film - itself a story of one woman's interlude in her early years - feels like the first movie that's pure Bergman: the mad, obsessive, probing and deeply personal film artist who, more than any other, placed us so deep into the lives, thoughts, dreams and emotions of any number of now-immortal screen characters.

Marie (Maj-Britt Nilsson) and Henrik (Birger Malmsten) are two characters who probably deserve to take a place amidst that pantheon of indelible creatures Bergman has etched over his decades of making great cinema. If they take a less lofty spot than some, it's only because the Maestro had so many more years of life experience and artistry ahead of him. Marie is probably the one character closest in age to Bergman at the time. She's 28 and a prima ballerina with the Stockholm Company. Even at this young age, she's terrified of getting older and uncertain about what the future will indeed hold for her. These are clearly doubts Bergman would have understood, if not felt (in obviously different ways) himself.

He no doubt would have also had some experience with (and thoughts about) a character like Marie who shuts herself down emotionally to concentrate (at least seemingly) on her art. Her icy demeanour especially extends to the man who loves her (a journalist played by Alf Kjellin) and inspires a mounting desperation within him to be even more intensely insistent and demanding with respect to their relationship.

Finally, though, what really plagues Marie is an interlude from her past. As a teenager and burgeoning ballerina, she spent a warm summer in a rural area outside of the city. In a handful of extended flashbacks, rendered through a diary written by the shy, frail, teenage boy who loved her deeply during those long-ago days of idyllic summer frolics, Bergman renders a deeply romantic and ultimately tragic love story.

Overall though, Summer Interlude is a love triangle in duplicate. In the present, the triangle involves Marie, the journalist and her sudden reminiscence of the past - before she closed herself off completely to passion. In the flashbacks, the triangle is between Marie, the sweet Henrik and Marie's devotion to her career as a dancer. Though Bergman roots this in the world of an artist, it's certainly universal to anyone who has devoted themselves to their calling to the extent where "normal" human relations are stunted.

There is, too, a long tradition of telling stories - mostly from male artists - about women who feel responsible for decimating the hearts of their lovers in pursuit of their goals, dreams and talents. Bergman, however, takes his place here along with Carl Dreyer, James Joyce, Eugene O'Neill, Tennessee Williams and (to a certain extent) his chief influence August Strindberg as an artist who is sensitive to the demands patriarchy places upon women to the extent that the female characters, and Marie in particular, are fraught with feelings of guilt surrounding their choice of freedom over traditional romantic roles - so much so that they seal their emotions deep within them.

Summer Interlude is replete with so many moments of visual beauty and emotional tenderness that it would be difficult to imagine an audience not being deeply moved by both the love story in flashback and the one which occurs in the present tense. And of course, it wouldn't be Bergman without a dollop or two of creepiness - best exemplified by Marie's loathsome Uncle (brilliantly etched by the almost reptilian Georg Funkquist).

It's what I always loved about Bergman. Just when things threaten to get too emotionally tender or even humanistically harrowing, he digs into his back pocket and tosses in some glob of grotesquerie. Uncle Georg is Summer Interlude's equivalent to Ingrid Thulin masturbating and mutilating her genitals in Bergman's Cries and Whispers. Uncle George is a bit tame compared to that, but all Bergman needed was a little time.

And some interludes.

"Summer Interlude" is available on an astonishingly gorgeous Blu-Ray from the visionary Criterion Collection. Replete with a new digital restoration, an uncompressed monaural soundtrack (my favourite!!!), a new English subtitle translation and an essay by Peter Cowie, this is definitely a disc any self-respecting Bergman worshipper will NOT be without."

DIARY OF A COUNTRY PRIEST - Review By Greg Klymkiw - Robert Bresson's perfect film is proof positive of cinema's power to instil faith and regeneration. "Diary of a Country Priest" is part of the continuing TIFF Cinematheque retrospective of the complete works of Robert Bresson as organized/curated by legendary film programmer/curator James Quandt.

Diary of a Country Priest (1951) dir. Robert Bresson
Starring: Claude Laydu, Nicole Ladmiral, Jean Riveyre, Marie-Monique Arkell, Rachel Bérendt, Bernard Hubrenne, Martine Lemaire

*****

By Greg Klymkiw

“Some of us are Jews, some are Gentiles, some are slaves, and some are free. But, we have all been baptized into one body by one Spirit, and we all share the same Spirit”. 1st Corinthians 12:13

Cinema is sacred. Robert Bresson understood this more than any filmmaker. Furthermore, his utterly perfect Diary of a Country Priest, embodying the true power of cinema, is a motion picture as sacred as the medium of film itself and endowed with the greatest ability to transcend all that art has given us.

It is grace itself.

The ability of cinema to instil faith and regeneration are, I think, unparalleled and certainly, Bresson achieved this through much of his career. Though he generated great work before and after Diary of a Country Priest, there are no other films in his canon (and few films generated by a handful of others) that deserve as lofty a stature.

Even now, in an age when many have given up on this artistic medium to soar, to truly fulfill the promise it first held at the turn of the 20th century, movies continue - against incredible odds - to be the one artistic medium to bring together so many facets of expression, that to give up on it feels more heretical than anything anyone (including the Catholics) could dream up. Though most contemporary theatrical feature films are generated cynically as roller coaster rides for the (seemingly) indiscriminate, this surely is no different than the dawn of cinema when the medium was akin to a carnival sideshow trifle. Besides, in the hundred years of its existence, there have always been artists who used (and continue to use) the medium in ways that allow us to soar beyond the mere visceral - to touch our hearts and minds in ways that few art forms can attain.

Leo Tolstoy, arguably one of the greatest (if not THE greatest) writer of the modern age had the opportunity to taste the power of film ever-so briefly at the dawn of cinema and lamented that such a mode of expression became available to him far too late in his life. He saw the potential in movies to take his own mode of expression so much further than he believed his writing allowed him. Though he experimented with achieving a three dimensional scope in his drama on the stage, it was cinema where he saw the most potential to present what words were incapable of expressing alone - a medium where words could be translated into a universal, visual language with drama, poetry, scope and life itself. Not just "physical" life, but the spiritual elements that also comprise the very being of existence.

When Tolstoy's great philosophical work "What is Art?" was finally published to his liking (without state censorship) in 1898, he spoke of the "art of the future" as being one that "will be chosen from among all the art diffused among mankind [and that it] will consist, not in transmitting feelings accessible only to members of the rich classes, but [that it will] transmit feelings drawing men together in brotherly union, or such universal feelings as can unite all men."

This "art of the future" indeed became cinema, and Robert Bresson is, without a doubt, one of its high priests. Though he continually claimed to be interested in stripping away unnecessary "adornments", his work is infused with his own brand of adornment - rooted deeply in the language of cinema, but used to its highest degrees.

Diary of a Country Priest is, on its surface, the simple tale of a young priest (Claude Laydu) who takes over his first parish in the village of Ambricourt. Just out of the seminary, he dreams of establishing himself and God's work as a vital part of the provincial community he is plopped into. Plagued with illness and a parish that suspects his intentions (and, in fact, takes advantage of his earnest desire to help), he faces challenges of both the physical and spiritual kind. In spite of this, he refuses to give up and even when he discovers that he is not suffering from an ulcer, or even tuberculosis, but deadly stomach cancer, he faces an even greater challenge in which to commit himself to an overwhelming force greater than himself.

The force of love.

Bresson, of course, understands the beauty of simplicity and how it is a perfect tool to yield layers of complexity. Once again, using primarily non-actors in actual locations, he generates a natural quality that enhances the work, but he does not eschew the power inherent in the medium itself and both uses it and pushes it in order to place us in a genuine state of grace. Bresson's trademark long takes and simple camera set-ups with little or no movement are used here to perfection.

One of the most powerful demonstrations of Bresson's command of cinema occurs when the priest travels to Lille to see a specialist and discovers he's terminally ill. He visits Dufrety (Bernard Hubrenne), an old friend from the seminary who has since given up his vows to set up an apothecary and live with a woman out of wedlock. Dufrety resides in a squalid suite and his common-law wife apologizes for its condition while explaining that she must work long hours as a cleaning lady in order to support her husband and herself as he tries to make his new business get off the ground.

In what must be one of the most extraordinary shots in movie history we begin just after the priest has entered the suite. He stands at the bed. Fatigued, he sits. The camera moves into a close head and shoulders shot of the priest. Eventually Dufrety moves into the shot and the camera pulls back a bit to allow for a gorgeously composed two-shot. When Dufrety leaves the frame, the camera slowly moves back to the head and shoulders position on the priest. At one point, there is a jarring jerk of the camera as the priest gets a stab of pain. The camera moves in even closer and fades to black, almost iris-like upon the look of horror and despair that wracks the priest's visage.

This entire shot lasts just over three minutes - with no cuts whatsoever. The "content" of the shot is primarily Dufrety explaining his woeful situation and dismissing his common-law wife, complaining that "she counts for nothing" in his "intellectual life". One of the few times the priest speaks in this sequence which is, essentially, a monologue from Dufrety, is the devastatingly heart-felt revelation that if he, like Dufrety, had broken his vows, he'd "rather it had been for love of a woman" than for what Dufrety calls his "intellectual life".

This is cinema at its highest level.

We have a central character, who has been besieged with all manner of ill-will from his parish (in spite of his efforts to be truly helpful) and has had more than several reasons to question his own faith and yet, his steadfast belief in one thing never changes - that faith and grace are love itself. (His doubts are the hurdles he must surmount in order to successfully attain this goal.) Here, within this dramatic sequence, which takes place entirely in one shot focused upon the priest, we see a man wracked with unbearable physical pain. However, and in spite of this, he reveals that his faith in love has not left him - that the spirit of God, his own spirit, is firmly committed to the notion that love is the ultimate spirit that embraces all.

To say this is one of the most moving, heartbreaking and yet inspirational dramatic sequences in all of cinema is, frankly, an understatement. Bresson's mise-en-scene is exactly the right way to capture the dramatic and thematic concerns of the film and its central character.

Indeed, through much of the film, there is no love. His favourite pupil at Catechism (Martine Lemaire) makes a point of learning her scripture in order to mock him and hurt his feelings. The daughter (Nicole Ladmiral) of a philandering count (Jean Riveyre) whom he tries to show kindness to spreads vicious rumours about him. And in a key sequence, when the priest attempts, in spite of the physical pain coursing through his body to offer spiritual healing to the heartbroken wife of the count (Marie-Monique Arkell), he discovers that one day after accepting the Holy Spirit back in her life, she dies.

Diary of a Country Priest is spiritual and, in its own way, a deeply religious experience, BUT without dogma and rendered in a fashion that comes closest to a drama of life itself. Possibly because of Bresson's own personal interest in the Calvinist influence upon Catholicism via Jansenism (a movement that was grudgingly tolerated, but eventually deemed heretical by the Catholic Church) was he so inspired to make a movie about faith that questioned the tenets of organized religion and furthermore, placed emphasis on a PERSONAL acceptance of predestination and the importance of finding divine grace in love.

Bresson's need to strip away conventional cinematic storytelling adheres very closely to Tolstoy's interpretation of early Christian appreciation for art. According to Tolstoy, Christians who accepted the teachings of Christ, but "not in the perverted, paganised form in which it was accepted subsequently" were also not tolerant of "plastic representations" - especially when they were purely "symbolical" - or, in a bit of interpretive paraphrasing, when art resorted to archetypes or stereotypes.

Bresson takes his characters and places them within a careful, delicate mise-en-scene that allows for a narrative and thematic purity. The title character, not only by his words and actions, but by the manner in which Bresson assembles his shots, cuts and forward movement, comes ever-closer to the spiritual notion of INDIVIDUAL faith.

In fact, Tolstoy points to the very religion and tainted atmosphere that Bresson's priest finds himself within. Tolstoy, especially in how it relates to art, condemns the "New" Christianity as one that "did not acknowledge the fundamental and essential positions of true Christianity", that being "the immediate relationship of each man to the Father, the consequent brotherhood and equality of all men, and the substitution of humility and love in place of every kind of violence."

This places Bresson's title character squarely within the context of a religion that Tolstoy insists is "contrary" to Christ's teachings and firmly rooted in a false "heavenly hierarchy similar to the pagan mythology, and having introduced the worship of Christ, of the Virgin, of angels, of apostles, of saints, and of martyrs, and not only of these divinities themselves, but also of their images, it made blind faith in the Church and its ordinances the essential point of its teaching."

This is what our Country Priest faces - in himself, his colleagues and his parish. What he must discover, what perhaps we ALL must discover is in the simple words which end the priest's life (over the iconic image - in shadow, no less - of the crucifix).

"What does it matter?" asks our Country Priest before definitively proclaiming, "All is grace."

And so it is.

"Diary of a Country Priest" is part of the TIFF Cinemtheque's major retrospective organized and curated by the legendary programmer James Quandt. Aptly titled "The Poetry of Precision: The Films of Robert Bresson", this and every other Bresson film is unspooling at the TIFF Bell Lightbox in Toronto and over a dozen cinemas across North America. "Diary of a Country Priest" is also available on a stunning Criterion Collection DVD. This is definitely worth owning, but only AFTER or in TANDEM with seeing the picture ON A BIG SCREEN - ON FILM.

"Diary of a Country Priest" is screening at TIFF Bell Lightbox Sunday February 12 at 4:00 PM and Saturday March 3 at 4:00 PM.

To order tickets and read Quandt's fabulous program notes, visit the TIFF website HERE.

To read my opening tribute to Bresson and this series, feel free to visit The Robert Bresson Man-Cave™ HERE. I am reviewing every film Bresson ever made. In case you missed it, my review of "A Man Escaped" is HERE, my review of "Pickpocket" is HERE and my review of "Mouchette" is HERE.