HOUDINI - Review By Greg Klymkiw - Fun Technicolor biopic of legendary escape artist

If you dare doubt Tony Curtis is one of the most gorgeous movie stars - ever - you're CLEARLY OUT OF YOUR MIND!!!

Yeah, OK, Janet Leigh is HOT, too.

Houdini (1953)
dir. George Marshall
Starring: Tony Curtis,
Janet Leigh

Review By Greg Klymkiw

If you’re looking for a penetrating and even modestly accurate dramatic depiction of the life of Harry Houdini, the legendary escape artist, this is probably not it. If, however, you’re looking for a tremendous performance from a great star in his peak years, you could do a whole lot worse than Houdini. The handsome, virile Tony Curtis commands the screen so voraciously that it feels almost like a one-man show. It isn’t, however, since he’s supported by the mouth watering Janet Leigh as Houdini’s long-suffering and only moderately supportive wife.

Directed by the sturdy prolific hack George Marshall, Houdini is a strangely enjoyable Hollywood biopic. With a script by Philip (Broken Lance, Detective Story) Yordan, the movie, surprisingly, doesn’t have one of the strongest narrative arcs in the world. In spite of this, the picture delights since Marshall cannily keeps his camera trained, like a bee to a flower petal upon the gorgeous, talented Tony Curtis that much of the story, such as it is, hovers within his glorious realm in a sort of crazed adulatory perpetuum. Though the movie plays fast and loose with many of the actual details of Houdini’s life, one gets a strong sense of the man's drive and charisma and, in so doing, captures his mythic essence -- the myth and the mystery.

Part of Houdini’s considerable entertainment value is also due to the attention to production value from powerhouse producer George Pal who crammed the picture with as much wonder and star-power as could only come from the man who produced and/or directed some of the finest entertainments of the 50s including The Time Machine, Tom Thumb, War of the Worlds, When Worlds Collide and, among others, that great series of animated Puppetoons that included the likes of Tubby the Tuba. It was Pal, no doubt, who saw what a perfect Houdini Tony Curtis would make.

Curtis plays the title character as a driven man – driven to romancing the woman of his choosing, driven to success and driven to seeking greater and more dangerous challenges. While Marshall doesn’t have much in the way of a distinctive directorial voice, he spent much of his career capturing star performances and exploiting them to the hilt. Much of Marshall’s best work was in comedy and he trained his workmanlike eyes on such stars as Bob Hope, Martin and Lewis and Jackie Gleason. He also had one great movie in him – Destry Rides Again, a terrific western with Marlene Dietrich and James Stewart, an oater that never fails to entertain.

Houdini begins with a typical Hollywood meet-cute wherein our title character catches a glimpse of the gorgeous Bess (Janet Leigh) from behind a circus sideshow cage where he is made-up grotesquely as a jungle wild man. He keeps wooing her in savage beast mode, but when she catches a glimpse of him without the makeup, she’s also smitten. How could she not be?They quickly marry and begin touring circuses and honky-tonk vaudeville houses as a husband and wife magic act. Soon, this life grows wearying for wifey and she begs her hunky hubbles to settle down and take a real job. He agrees, for a time, and toils, rather conveniently in a factory devoted to designing, building and selling locks and safes. Here he becomes obsessed with the notion of death-defying escapes, manages to convince the little lady wifey. Upon his re-entry into the world of show business, Houdini becomes bigger than he ever imagined was possible.

Marshall expertly handles the escape routines – so much so that even though WE know Houdini’s going to beat them hands-down, we still feel considerable suspense as each one is presented. A lot of the credit for the suspense generated in these scenes must go to Curtis and his performance – alternating as it does from boyish wonder to driven madman. Curtis plays Houdini as no mere entertainer, but someone who is not personally satisfied unless he is genuinely cheating death every step of the way.

Less successfully rendered is the annoying, obtrusive love story. It is a constant blessing that Janet Leigh is so easy on the eyes, for her character is not so easy on the ears. The character of Bess is almost harridan-like in her constant whining: “Harry, don’t do this. Harry, don’t do that. Harry, get a real job. Harry, I want a family. Harry, I want us to settle down. Harry, that’s too dangerous. Harry, you’re going to kill yourself. Harry, you love your stunts more than you love me.”

Nothing like a babe-o-licious harridan to keep a good man down.

Luckily, she doesn’t. The movie forges on with one daring stunt after another and luckily, one of Miss Leigh’s harridan-o-ramas is certainly not without entertainment value. The sequence involving Houdini’s preparations for his famous dip into the icy waters of the Detroit River are as hilarious as anything I’ve seen recently. Tony Curtis lying in a claw-footed bathtub covered in ice cubes whilst a team of men pour more bucket loads on top of him as wifey continues nagging at him, is not only funny, but chillingly (if you’ll forgive the pun) reminiscent of moments I and other men close to me (they know who they are) have experienced with their significant others at the most inopportune junctures.

Men who never grow up will always be boys.

Finally, I wish to divulge the weepy Hollywood ending which bears absolutely nothing close to the real Houdini’s death, but I won't - suffice it to say that Leigh removes the mask of the harridan long enough for Curtis to emote so expertly that it’s a tear-squirting corker of a finale.

And that is worthy of all the Technicolor glory lavished upon this lovely gem from a much simpler time.

The Film Corner Rating: *** 3 Stars

Houdini is available on DVD from Legend Films.

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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.

TOKYO STORY - Review By Greg Klymkiw - Ozu Masterpiece Gets Deluxe Criterion BD

One of the great, if not the greatest of all films ever made about family by one of cinema's true masters. Tokyo Story often feels like it stands alone in its indelible and consummately perfect portrait of lives well lived to lay a groundwork - for better or worse - for future generations to benefit and carry on from the love and sacrifices of those who came before and that life, in all its joy and sadness is a never-ending cycle of growth and regeneration through death.

(Top L to R) Setsuko Hara, Haruko Sugimura, Sō Yamamura, Kuniko Miyake
(Bottom L to R) Mitsuhiro Mori, Chieko Higashiyama, Chishū Ryū, Zen Murase 

As Noriko, Setsuko Hara, Japanese Cinema's greatest actress
and one of its biggest and most beloved stars.

Tokyo Story (1953) *****
Dir. Yasujirō Ozu
Scr. Kōgo Noda, Ozu
Starring: Chishū Ryū, Chieko Higashiyama, Setsuko Hara
Review By Greg Klymkiw

Is there anything sadder than children living their own lives at the expense of forgetting their parents, or worse, acknowledging their parents' "mere" existence as something which, annoyingly, impedes upon their own growth, their own lives? Is there, finally, anything more selfish? Probably not, but is it simply a terrible truth we all must accept as the normal course of life, love and death? Is forgetfulness an act of thoughtlessness or is it that thing we ultimately need to keep living?

These are questions that face us during and after seeing Yasujirō Ozu's perfect film, Tokyo Story. It is a film that instills considerable pain in us, yet it's not one we experience solely within the context of viewing the lives of others - a deep sorrow that we can toss off as one experienced by watching sad figures on a celluloid landscape belonging to fictional characters or, indeed, dramatic recreations of those we know exist, but that we can feel a complacent disconnect from by the act of passively witnessing their actions up on a screen. No, these are finally real people and in Ozu's masterful hands, they are, indeed, all of us.

The tale told here is as simple, and as such, as complex as life itself. Shūkichi and Tomi Hirayama (Ryū, Higashiyama) are the elderly parents of three sons (one of whom never returned from World War II), two daughters and two grandchildren. They have never left their rural enclave and in their waning years, they decide to visit Tokyo, the city they've never seen and the home of their married children.

Their presence, however, is merely tolerated and the greatest welcome and kindness they receive is from their widowed daughter-in-law Noriko (Hara). The elders' vacation is a bittersweet affair - some sightseeing, an uneventful stay in a spa, less than hospitable treatment from their children, a madcap night of drinking for Shūkichi and an old buddy, several warm visits with the daughter-in-law who still carries a torch for their deceased son and finally, a sad journey back to their home far away from the bustle of Tokyo - a sojourn that ends in an unexpected loss.

There aren't any beats in this narrative bereft of emotion. As seemingly straightforward as the events are, Ozu manages to touch us more deeply than any film seems to have the right to do. He achieves this by employing the same deft simplicity in his style as he and his screenwriting collaborator Kōgo Noda bring to bear upon their gorgeous script.

Ozu compliments the writing perfectly by training his camera steadily upon the life of the story, allowing the events to unfurl naturalistically within the frame of a fixed position - never moving, except for one shot, and another that feels like it's moving, but isn't - and rooted in low, yet eye-level perspectives that resemble the position taken by the characters as they sit upon their traditional Japanese tatami mats. Dialogue never seems to overlap, nor does Ozu cut away (at least not so we notice) from characters when they are speaking.

The pace is slow, but always riveting in spite, or rather, because of the stillness. In fact, what tends to move us in the deepest ways is how we watch, ever-so painstakingly and painfully as we see a family torn by time, space and finally the sort of differences inherent in all the characters and their sense of individuality. There are no shrill screaming matches or barbed verbal sparring - instead it is both time and silence that provides us with an ineffaceable sense of decay.

Life, as it unfolds, is death - one that creeps slowly, yet inexorably to where all our lives do. Is there disappointment experienced and expressed? Of course and it's conveyed with both delicacy and the kind of matter-of-factness that we all recognize as the way things are.

At one point, Shūkichi notes: "We can't expect too much from our children." On one hand, it feels like he's almost sighing this notion in defeat and disappointment, but the character is also someone who observes life pass almost like a wry Cheshire Cat. Rather than betraying inscrutability, he expresses a truth that seems less terrible and rather one of acceptance. This is finally what's so heartbreaking. He does not say this with resignation, but with the kind of truth that can only be gained by a lifetime of both observation and just plain living.

Shūkichi's consideration of the reality of what parents must or rather, must not expect from their children parallels the equally powerful moment in Tokyo Story when Kyōko (Kyōko Kagawa), the youngest (and unmarried) Hirayama daughter asks, "Isn't life disappointing?" and the wise, warm Noriko offers up a knowing smile and replies, so simply and so tellingly, "Yes, it is."

And damned if Noriko isn't right! Life is disappointing, but so it must be to allow for those momentary bursts of joy and elation to shine like the light sparkling upon us in the clear of a night sky. When youngest son Keizo (Shiro Osaka) says, "No one can serve his parents beyond the grave," he delivers yet another of the film's seemingly terrible truths, but in the end, it's actually not so terrible - our parents ultimately never want us to serve them beyond or even before the grave.

The glorious (and yes, somewhat melancholy) truth Ozu delivers is that it is our parents who selflessly serve us, and if we're doing the right thing, what we must all do to preserve the regeneration and perpetuation of life is to selflessly serve our children, but to never expect or demand that it be reciprocated.

This then, is love and Tokyo Story is nothing if it's not about that.

"Tokyo Story" as presented in the glistening new Criterion Collection dual format package is yet another home entertainment package to own and to cherish. In addition to the exquisite film itself, Criterion has pulled out all the stops and gone well above and beyond the call of duty and included the following supplements to our enjoyment and appreciation of this truly great film: a new digital 4K restoration and transfer to Blu-Ray, a commentary track by Ozu expert David Desser, "I Lived, But . . .", a feature length 1983 doc about Ozu’s life and career, "Talking with Ozu", a forty-minute 1993 "Tribute to Ozu" by Lindsay Anderson, Claire Denis, Hou Hsiao-hsien, Aki Kaurismäki, Stanley Kwan, Paul Schrader and Wim Wenders, a 1988 doc on actor Chishu Ryu, a trailer, an all-new English subtitle translation and a lovely booklet featuring an essay by David Bordwell. It doesn't get better than this, folks!