Big Screen Boston: From Mystery Street to The Departed and Beyond -- a new book by Paul Sherman

'The Frugal Yankee' interview

Garen Daly is not only the fellow responsible for Boston's annual Presidents' Day sci-fi marathon. He was also once manager of Cambridge's late, great Orson Welles Cinema, ran the Somerville Theater during the 1980s (he was one of the people responsible for making Davis Square's turnaround possible--i.e., no moviehouse, no Redbones, no Disc Diggers, then no "Paris of the '90s")  and he co-hosts the Frugal Yankee radio program. Last week, Garen and co-host Louise Reilly Sacco interviewed me about the book, and you can listen to it here .

Dude, read the book already!

I heard that Ty Burr had some nice things to say when Big Screen Boston came up on an online chat on boston.com, saying yours truly "knows his stuff." But he confessed that the book was still sitting on his desk and he hasn't had a chance to read it yet. Let's hope he gets around to it and is able to review the book in the Globe. Ty grew up locally and has always been a shrewd assessor of movies shot here, so I'm interested in hearing what he thinks of the book.

Book excerpt: "Walk East on Beacon!"

If 1950's Mystery Street is a good example of the post-WWII location thriller coming to Boston, 1952's Walk East on Beacon! is its not-so-good counterpart. While the first brings a foreboding film noir tone to the city, the second just uses it for some hysterical anti-Communist fear-mongering (I guess the exclamation point in the title is a dead giveaway). Ironically, though, Walk East offers a better peek at the city because it has more daylight action (and it lacks the skill to create a mood through use of darkness)--for instance, it's the only Hollywood movie that shot in Scollay Square. It's also never come out on home video, so it's certainly worth checking out if you ever get the chance.

1952. Directed by Alfred Werker. Written by Leo Rosten and Emmett Murphy. Based on Crime of the Century by J. Edgar Hoover. With George Murphy, Finlay Currie, Virginia Gilmore and Karel Stepanek. Cinematography by Joseph C. Brun.

CHELSEA NATIVE LOUIS de Rochemont was one of the producers behind the post-World War II wave of docudrama thrillers that includes Mystery Street and this 1952 Boston movie. Some of these movies take creative inspiration from Italian neorealism, Jules Dassin’s The Naked City or Anthony Mann’s T-Men. But de Rochemont’s inspiration wasn’t fictional entertainment, it was his own career producing the March of Time newsreels. At the tail end of WWII, he wed the heavy narration and real locations of newsreels with a ripped-from-the-headlines plot in the Manhattan-set The House on 92nd Street, in which an FBI agent infiltrates a Nazi spy ring.
    Seven years later, he came home for Walk East on Beacon! There’s no infiltration in this overheated Cold War drama, but there is a spy ring and the FBI to crack it, led by the agent played by future politician George Murphy. The movie adapts an article written by FBI director J. Edgar Hoover (or by whoever ghostwrote it for him), and it starts and ends with much flag-waving on behalf of the Bureau and the fine, upstanding men who keep America safe from its “hidden enemies.”
    Although Walk East is painless enough to sit through, a more expressive story might have better paid tribute to law enforcement than the anti-Communist message movie we get. Whatever legitimate threat there was from Soviet espionage after WWII was clearly exploited by Hoover into a menace that allowed him to position himself as America’s watch dog, and the movie eagerly plays Hoover’s enabler. After all, what can you say when a character who lost two children in a concentration camp tells an FBI agent, “I survived Buchenwald, Inspector. I know many Communists and how they work.” That, of all people, this survivor should know better than to shift Nazi blame? That the screenwriters ought to be ashamed of themselves?
    But that’s the kind of hysteria Walk East seeks to inspire. The story itself is a rather routine investigative thriller lacking much emotion and mood. If it has any style, it’s an anti-style. But since this was made at a time when shadowy, visually expressive film noir was in full swing, such anti-style seems flat by comparison. When there actually is a scene of human emotion—when the Commie-aiding cab driver (Jack Manning) confesses to his wife about being trapped into helping them—you momentarily see what the movie is missing. But that’s the only taste you get of such human drama.
    The value of the movie’s real Boston footage in the early 1950s is much greater than that of its FBI cheerleading, stock characters (like pipe-smoking intellectuals) and forensic gadgetry (Mystery Street integrated the last into a thriller much better). Action takes place in the Public Garden, Louisburg Square, South Station, Longfellow Bridge, Storrow Drive and the Robert Gould Shaw Memorial across from the State House, among other places, while there are incidental shots of Harvard Square, Memorial Drive, the Mystic River (Tobin) Bridge, the old Ritz (now the Taj), pre-makeover Faneuil Hall and the corner of Park and Tremont streets, with a nice shot of a Dorothy Muriel’s bakery. And that’s legendary Scollay Square where we see the amazing sign for Jack’s Lighthouse, as well as a tattoo parlor and The Tasty (any relation to the one in Harvard Square seen in Love Story and Good Will Hunting?).
►Locations: Charlestown, Back Bay, South Station, East Boston, Scollay Square, Beacon Hill, West End, Boston.
►Accents: Full of FBI agents from all over the country, spies who’ve come to Boston to hide their real identities and immigrants, the story doesn’t have much call for local accents. But it seems that many of the bit parts—lower-lever agents, dispatchers, etc.—were cast with local non-professionals (probably guys who did those real jobs everyday). So every so often you’ll get a real Bostonian talking.
►Local color: Although some of the movie was shot in New Hampshire and beyond—the huuuge mainframe computer seen was the Selective Service Electronic Calculator at IBM in New York—this is the one category where Walk East outdoes Mystery Street. The latter is a much better movie, because its dark mood summons the danger Walk East does not, but that darkness obscures the shooting locations. Walk East isn’t a quarter as creative, but its preponderance of broad daylight shots in public places is just great for playing “Where’s that?” and seeing how certain spots have changed in 50-plus years.

Screening #4: "The Dark End of the Street," West Newton Cinema, May 21, 6:45 pm

After making one of the best Boston independent dramas, 1979's Billy in the Lowlands, Cambridge writer-director Jan Egleson was able to secure much of the funding for the follow-up from WGBH, which had aired Billy after its local theatrical run (and had been able to get some of the glory when the movie won a New England Emmy award). Like its predecessor, 1981's The Dark End of the Street is set in the world of the Cambridge working-class youths Egleson had met at The Group School. Although DEOTS has a more complex story, it sacrifices none of the decidedly un-Hollywood rawness of Billy. This time Henry Tomaszewski's Billy Shaughnessy is still around, but his girlfriend Donna (Laura Harrington) is the center of attention. Once again, it's a story of a "project kid" trying to find a better way in life, and there is no "Hollywood ending." I'm thrilled to be able to present the movie at West Newton Cinema, at 6:45pm on May 21. This very entertaining and significant Boston movie has never come out on home video and has not shown locally since 2001, and Jan Egleson will be joining me at the screening. Oh, and did I mention a little blond 8-year-old named Ben Affleck plays the heroine's little brother? That's him in the photo, with Harrington (left) and Janice Brown (sporting a nifty Group School t-shirt). Ben, we'll save you a seat...

Book excerpt: 'The Thomas Crown Affair' [at the Brattle, May 10]

Coincidental to the screenings of Boston movies I set up, the Brattle Theater is showing the original 1968 version of The Thomas Crown Affair as part of its great United Artists retrospective. That seemed like the perfect excuse to offer this excerpt about the movie, a film so blatantly "fabulous" that you have to cut it slack for having little relation to reality.

1968. Directed by Norman Jewison. Written by Alan Trustman. With Steve McQueen, Faye Dunaway, Paul Burke and Jack Weston. Cinematography by Haskell Wexler.

I HAVE VERY VAGUE recollection of the media coverage of the glittery Boston premiere that greeted Norman Jewison’s movie. Such events were (and still are) a very rare occurrence down around here, but for some reason Hollywood really, really liked Boston in 1968. Along with Charly and The Boston Strangler, the original version of The Thomas Crown Affair gave the city a Hollywood hat trick that year. For better or worse, none of them is as “Hollywood” as this glossy romantic drama.
    It’s a state-of-the-art confection set in an impossibly urbane Boston concocted by Alan Trustman, a local lawyer who went on to pen more movies. Director Jewison and composer Michel Legrand then buffed it to a spiffy sheen. Steve McQueen plays the title character, a blue-blooded investment wiz who, between buying low and selling high at his Post Office Square headquarters, masterminds crimes and seeks thrills wherever he can find them, whether it’s from golf-course betting or piloting gliders. He’s a sort of American James Bond in a three-piece suit, but he serves only his own interests.
    As with The Boston Strangler, this exercise in style shows the influence of the split-screen films screened at Expo ’67—Christopher Chapman’s A Place to Stand in this case. Jewison uses multiple imagery often in the story’s first third, when a Crown-hired crew descends on a bank and robs it of $2.6 million (in scenes shot at the old Shawmut Bank on Congress Street). The build-up and execution of the heist are thrilling and offer glimpses of a wide variety of sights, from Washington Street and Stuart Street to the corner of Cambridge and Linden Streets, with the Allston train yard behind it.
    The little celebratory dance and chuckle in which Crown privately indulges once the job is done, and he can kick back in his Mt. Vernon Street townhouse, tells you all you need to know about why he takes risks that jeopardize his cushy life. He gets a life-affirming kick out of it. Posh insurance investigator Vicky Anderson (Dunaway) recognizes Crown’s need to push himself because she has the same sort of driven personality. When she’s called in to crack the case, The Thomas Crown Affair ignites its romantic sparks and turns into the tale of two alpha dogs in heat. Canine personalities aside, their affair is pure cat-and-mouse stuff, with Vicky telling him why she’s in town and why she’s keeping an eye on him, and Crown similarly finding her to be both a kindred spirit and an enemy.
    But sometimes the movie overdoes it. It’s one thing for the romance to be a metaphorical chess game, it’s another for it to have Crown and Vicky sit down and play chess, especially with the overripe chess-as-sex images that accompany the game. It’s enough to make you think the moviemakers aren’t in on the fact that the movie is a fluffy, silly diversion, nothing more. Then again, any movie containing the hats Dunaway wears would have to be partially silly.
    Jewison estimates on the movie’s DVD that he shot “70%” of The Thomas Crown Affair on location. Hamilton’s Myopia Hunt Club (the polo sequence) and Crane Beach’s dunes provide outside-the-city scenery, Cambridge Cemetery figures heavily in the plot and the Haymarket and Copp’s Hill Burying Ground add urban atmosphere. Of course, the 1999 remake decided Boston just wasn’t upscale enough
and moved the story to New York.
►Locations: Beacon Hill, Financial District, Allston, North End, Back Bay, Boston; Cambridge; Ipswich; Hamilton; Beverly; Belmont.
►Accents: McQueen attempted a Boston accent in rehearsals, but it was decided against. Hopefully, someone told him a character like Crown most likely wouldn’t even have a Boston accent. Locals in supporting roles provide the accents here, including Worcester-born Nina Marlowe as cop Paul Burke’s secretary and the two real Boston Police patrolmen who rouse the detective that Crown KO’s, douses in
booze and then puts in a car.
►Local color: While there are plenty of familiar and not-so-familiar sights on display, the movie takes place in a rarefied, upper-class Boston. For those of us who don’t drive a Rolls, stable a polo mount at the Myopia and bed down in a Beacon Hill townhouse (complete with butler), this is a Bizarro Boston we don’t generally experience. But it is true to Crown’s world. The color is more class-specific than location-specific, since Crown has more in common with other rich people, regardless of where they’re from, than he does with other Bostonians. It’s not as if he’s hanging out with bookies from Jamaica Plain or cheering on Ken Harrelson from the bleachers at Fenway.

NewEnglandFilm.com interview

Just noticed that an interview I recently did with filmmaker/writer Jared M. Gordon is now up on NewEnglandFilm.com. Fairly coherent, despite my rambling!

Book excerpt: 'Titicut Follies'--screening 5/3, Noon, MFA

Appreciative audiences have enjoyed Girltalk and Billy in the Lowlands the last two nights. The third screening to help celebrate the release of Big Screen Boston is of Frederick Wiseman's squirm-inducing 1967 documentary, Titicut Follies, which I'll be introducing at the Museum of Fine Arts, on Saturday [May 3] at Noon. Here is the book's section on this disturbing and unforgettable movie.

1967. Directed by Frederick Wiseman. Cinematography by John Marshall.

FREDERICK WISEMAN’S FIRST DOCUMENTARY is still shocking today. Just imagine what Titicut Follies was like in 1967, when it was first shown. The Commonwealth of Massachusetts banned his peek behind the walls at Bridgewater State Hospital, claiming the movie invaded the privacy of patients there, who are often shown nude and in various states of helplessness. Of course, the ban—finally lifted in 1991—couldn’t have had anything to do with the cruelty with which the institution often treats those patients, right?
    Although Wiseman (High School, Domestic Violence) has long been a pillar of the documentary, he came to filmmaking in a roundabout way in the 1960s. He was already a lawyer when he made Titicut Follies, having lectured in law at Boston University from 1958 to 1961 and taken his students to Bridgewater State Hospital during that time. After working on Shirley Clarke’s minor independent classic Cool World, he decided to make a movie about the hospital. He asked for permission in 1964, and ultimately was allowed to film there in 1966.
    From the moment the movie begins, we enter a sort of absurd hellhole. The absurdity comes through mainly in the talent show that gives the movie its name (and bookends it). First, we see a group of uncomfortable men sing “Strike Up the Band”; then an eager emcee tells a corny joke about two beetles and a priest. But, wait, in the next sequence, in which guards search the belongings of stripped patients, we see that this emcee is not a patient, but a guard. One thing is sure: there is no scorecard to tell us who’s sane and who’s insane, who’s dangerous and who’s not dangerous.
    What follows—as is so often the case in Wiseman’s films about various institutions—is an impressionistic portrait of the hospital. Sometimes Wiseman focuses on specific threads, like a psychiatrist’s therapy session with a man sent to Bridgewater for molesting an underage girl, while other times there’s a more random series of sights and sounds, as when we follow the goings-on in the courtyard outlined by the hospital’s buildings. The treatment is never sensational.
    These glimpses of daily life can be amusing. One incessant ranter (in photo above; courtesy Zipporah Films) lets loose a stream-of- consciousness barrage of gibberish, real words and famous names that’s a cross between a jazz solo, a sermon and a stand-up routine. A later shot of the guy spewing verbiage in the courtyard while, behind him, another fellow stands on his head and sings a hymn may be the emblematic image of the collision of individual realities in the movie.
    But, mostly, Titicut Follies is grim and disturbing. Clearly Bridgewater, an exile for the maladjusted, presents a tough situation for staff there to handle. It is practically a no-win situation. But the casual cruelty dished out by the same staff can be striking, particularly in two instances. The first comes when one guard repeatedly questions a patient named Jim about his cell’s cleanliness. “How’s that room gonna be?” he asks over and over. And after nearly every reply from Jim, he says “What’d you say?” Treat the most normal person like this, and he or she will get agitated; try it on someone who’s locked up and vulnerable, and the effect is tragic. Later, a force-feeding of a patient who won’t eat—the movie’s most squirm-inducing sequence— is performed so casually that the psychiatrist doesn’t even put down his cigarette as he shoves inch after inch of tubing up the patient’s nose and funnels soup into the guy’s stomach. To make the action even more unsettling, Wiseman inserts shots of the patient’s corpse— presumably, taken not long after—into the sequence.
    Rejecting the cinema vérité label and the objectivity it implies, Wiseman has regularly examined the relationship between individuals and society’s institutions in his movies (including Near Death, filmed at Beth Israel Hospital). Titicut Follies remains one of his most potent looks at this difficult relationship.

'Billy in the Lowlands' tonight!

LAST NIGHT, A SMALL but appreciative audience at the Brattle Theater got to see the first local screening of Kate Davis' Girltalk in many years. Up tonight at the Brattle is Jan Egleson's groundbreaking Billy in the Lowlands, the most influential indie film ever made in Boston. Full of locations that just aren't there anymore (pre-Red Line extension Harvard Square, Paragon Park, Fresh Pond Shopping Center with its late-1970s roster of stores [Zayre, anyone?]), it inspired movies just after it (such as The Dozens, which won a Grand Prize at Sundance before it was called Sundance) and 15 years later (Rob Patton-Spruill's Squeeze and, to a certain extent, Good Will Hunting). Writer-director Jan Egleson will be joining me to talk about how he was the first Bostonian to make an attempt at sustained, grass-roots dramatic filmmaking.
    The book should be in stores today. If you go to a store and they don't have it, please ask them to carry it!

'Girltalk' tonight!

As part of the celebration of Big Screen Boston's release, tonight there will be a screening of Kate Davis' phenomenal 1987 documentary Girltalk, a very intimate, dramatic look at three Boston teen runaways  (at left is one of them, Mars). The movie hasn't been shown locally in years and is not as yet on DVD. The screening starts at 8 pm at the Brattle Theater in Harvard Square, and I'm very happy that Martha, one of the movie's subjects, will be on hand to talk about the movie, too.

Psst... Wanna buy a "bestseller"?

BIG SCREEN BOSTON HAS been ensconced in the Top 10 New England books on Amazon for most of the day today. Does that make it a bestseller? You can buy it there or here now, and it will be in bookstores on Thursday, if not sooner.
    The first three screenings of outstanding but rarely seen Boston movies I've set up around town are this week: Kate Davis' Girltalk at the Brattle Theater Wednesday at 8 pm; Jan Egleson's Billy in the Lowlands at the Brattle Thursday at 8; and Frederick Wiseman's Titicut Follies at the Museum of Fine Arts Saturday at Noon. It's the first area screening in at least five years for each of them. I'll be selling and signing books at all three, and I expect people involved with the making of the first two to be in attendance, as well. If you can't make Girltalk on Wednesday, catch me on Backstage with Barry Nolan on Wednesday night at 8 pm on CN8 (The Comcast Network). I'm supposed to be taping a segment earlier in the day.