Review: "American Traitor: The Trial of Axis Sally"

 

I had not heard of Mildred Gillars, an American erstwhile actress who was a star of the German radio propaganda campaign during World War II and was eventually tried and imprisoned as a traitor -- the first woman ever to be so convicted. Her broadcast moniker was "Axis Sally," though she also went by a few other, less savory nicknames like "The Bitch of Berlin."

Much like the more familiar Tokyo Rose, Sally's broadcasts were a mix of variety show and warning, giving American soldiers a little taste of home while trying to convince them their lives were being thrown away in the war effort.

Her trial in 1949 was a big media event, largely forgotten now. The new drama, "American Traitor: The Trial of Axis Sally," attempts to revive her infamy with some allusions to today's political strife.

Alas, the movie wavers between saccharine and silly, with Mildred herself played by Meadow Williams as an icy blonde lording it over the courtroom in an homage to Marlene Dietrich in "Witness for the Prosecution." Director Michael Polish, who co-wrote the screenplay with Vance Owen and Darryl Hicks, shoots the thing like a postwar soap opera, all gauzy lighting and syrupy string music.

The only real reason to watch is Al Pacino, who plays her attorney, James Laughlin, a kooky anti-establishment type who is handed the case with the intention to lose. At first I worried that Pacino would just have a cameo, the sort of thing where an aging star is paid a bunch of dough for a tiny role to goose a project's marketability. 

But no, it's a meaty part, and arguably bigger and more consequential than Sally herself. 

In fact, as enjoyable as Pacino is in this, the movie's main shortcoming is his character is far more interesting than hers. Mildred is played as a calculating woman who initially took the Germans' job for prestige, but later found herself trapped by circumstances, unable to leave the country or stop or alter the broadcasts.

The story plays out in a choppy fashion, the trial in 1949 intercut with flashbacks to Mildred's five years doing the broadcast between 1940 and the end of the war. There's also stock war footage thrown in here and there, rather clunkily.

Mildred had two main handlers in Germany: Max Otto Koischwitz (Carsten Norgaard), the German-American director of her radio programs and her fiance, and Joseph Goebbels himself, played by Thomas Kretschmann as a slithering serpent who summons her for threatening debriefs if she changes his script referencing the German army as "unbeatable" instead of "invincible." Indeed, it's depicted that Goebbels personally assaulted Mildred and threatened to kill her.

The romance with Max is an onscreen dud, and the scene where she visits him at his deathbed just this side of parody. Williams has a few solid scenes but also several of amateurish tone deafness.

Mitch Pileggi plays the priggish prosecutor who seems to actually lust for Mildred's blood, while Lala Kent is his right-hand assistant, Elva, who used to work for Pacino's character and seems to have some kind of vendetta against him. He is shown to be a little flirty, though nothing too over-the-top dirtbag for the 1940s.

The perpetual third wheel is Billy Owen (Swen Temmel), an untried attorney and former Marine who signs on to be Laughlin's co-counsel. Though a real figure, his story adds little to Mildred's or Laughlin's, portrayed as a moony idealist who is browbeaten by the attorney and entranced by the defendant. Their jail visit scenes are positively cringe-worthy, with Mildred haughtily rejecting his pleas to help at first, then using her feminine wiles to recruit him as a lifeline to Laughlin when it suits her needs.

Laughlin is an odd egg, wearing shambly suits with his tie knot loosened four inches low, mad-scientist hair and the affect of an ignored genius who knows he's bound to lose against the system but genuinely enjoys jousting at windmills. It's different from other, fiery courtroom scenes Pacino has played in "...And Justice For All" or "Scent of a Woman."

That was angry young Pacino and resentful and still angry middle-aged Pacino, respectively. Here he's a canny old bird who presents himself as folksier and less capable than he really is, content to rope-a-dope with the judge, jury and opposing counsel. We even learn that Laughlin had his own son who lost his life during the war, so clearly he cares more about this case than he lets on.

Honestly, they should've just made it the lawyer's story and kept Sally as this remote, mysterious figure who we never really figure out, sort of like Jeremy Irons in "Reversal of Fortune." The movie they made has the look and feel of a Lifetime Channel historical melodrama, with a central figure who's not empathetic or hateful but just simply... there.

Reeling Backward: "Cruising" (1980)

"Who's here? I'm here. You're here."

"Cruising" has the distinction of being the first mainstream movie to garner a major protest from the gay community.

Just a decade after Stonewall, the gay rights movement had gotten organized enough to stage street protests to try to disrupt the production in New York City. They blew whistles during the outdoor shots, forcing director William Friedkin to redub the  movie post-production, and even used reflectors from atop high rises to screw up their lighting.

It got more protests when it finally came out, though not enough -- or perhaps just the right amount -- to make it a moderate hit. Critics were fairly unimpressed, and today the film is pretty well forgotten except for the controversy.

Looking back with the perspective of 40 years, "Cruising" still isn't a very good movie but it's not a terrible one, either. Nor is it the lurid, gay-bashing piece of pulp it was labeled at the time.

Instead, it stands now as an observational piece that turns its eye on a particular place and time. In this case, it's the "leather" scene of the  1970s to early '80s typified by a fetish for leather jackets, pants, hats and other paraphernalia. Gay men would gather in  exclusionary bars to dance, flirt, have sex, do drugs, etc.

Gay hangouts had been underground for decades, and now they were becoming more public as the community founds its identity. It no doubt horrified "the straights," but that was an essential part of the movement up until fairly recently.

Interestingly,  the NYC gay club were largely operated by the Mafia, which is one reason they were relatively protected and allowed to thrive. Thanks, Guido!

Friedkin wanted Richard Gere for the lead because he had an androgynous prettiness to him, but settled for Al Pacino. There is obviously a lot of similarity to Pacino's breakout role in "Serpico," where he also played a cop going "deep undercover" into a world that was alien and frightening to him.

He plays Steve Burns, a street cop in his late 20s who is eager to get his "gold shield," aka make detective. (Pacino was actually 40.)

Captain Edelson (Paul Sorvino, made up to look haggard and prematurely old), who has been assigned to solve a string of gruesome murders of gay man, many of them discovered in dismembered pieces, taps Burns because he resembles the physical type favored by the killer: small stature, slim, dark hair and eyes. The idea is to use Burns as bait to draw the slasher out.

(Never commented upon is that the majority of men Burns encounters in the leather bars look just like him.)

Until now these killings have been swept under the rug, filed as CUPPI (Circumstances Undetermined Pending Police Investigation) with the body parts literally shoved in a coroner's drawer and forgotten. But they've started to get some press and gay activists, gifted with power for the first time, are pressuring city politicians for action.

So the movie gives a nod to the gay community that was trying to prevent it from being shot. The main criticism was the suggestion of an inherent connection between violence and homosexuality. Friedkin et all dismissed that, saying they were only telling a story about one small slice of gay men.

Later he came to acknowledge the film wasn't representative of a burgeoning movement.

The film follows Burns as he gradually immerses himself into the leather scene. "Cruising" was initially given an X rating by the MPAA rating because of the depiction of sex between men in the bars. (One wonders if identical scenes with heterogeneous couples would have been similarly labeled.) A bunch of the footage was cut out to make the grade.

Voyeurism is a key part of the aesthetic of the film, though it's fairly tame by today's standards. There are a bunch of asses but no dicks; we see plenty of men making out and groping each other, some simulated blowjobs and one fairly oblique depiction of fisting.

I wonder what the experience was like for contemporary audiences, which had just learned to accept pornographic films as part of the mainstream, and now were shown obvious, if not overt, gay sex.

The film doesn't just treat these men as objects, though. We meet Ted (Don Scardino), a struggling playwright living next door in the apartment Burns takes up as part of his cover. He's a spectacularly normal guy, worrying about money and his career, as well as conflicts with his roommate, a controlling dancer named Gregory (James Remar) we meet late in the movie.

We get introduced into this world, which like any other segment of human society has its own particular sets of rules and expectations. Burns notices men with colored bandannas hanging out of their pockets and asks a store vendor (Powers Booth) what they mean, learning they're signals for sex acts desired to be performed or received.

Later, when Burns wears one in a club and is approached, the other man becomes enraged when Burns says he only likes to watch. On another night he is gobsmacked when he returns to the same place and finds everyone is dressed as police officers, one of the regular "theme nights." He's asked to leave because, ironically, the one actual cop in the place isn't dressed as one.

A key failing in the story is how Burns is supposed to pass himself off as gay if he never engages in any sex acts with other man. It's like the classic trope among drug dealers suspicious of undercover LEOs, "Take a hit to prove you're not a cop."

I would think that he would quickly gain a reputation as a suspicious interloper, a curious dilettante or a cockteaser.

The movie was based on a 1970 novel by Gerald Walker, a New York Times crimes reporter who fashioned his story out of bits 'n' pieces of actual murders from his beat. My understanding is Friedkin, who also wrote the screenplay, inserted the leather scene  based on magazine articles and his own research, including frequenting some bars himself.

So it's very much a straight perspective exploring the gay scene like a zoological expedition, which no doubt played a part in resentment toward the movie. There was a budding gay cinema back then, including the films of Andy Warhol, though these didn't penetrate mainstream Hollywood.

Friedkin has said that he very much saw the project as another one of his gritty  investigative dramas, like "The French Connection," but set against a different backdrop. Indeed, once you take away the (lite) S&M and boys macking on each other, it's pretty much a straight police procedural.

The story occasionally returns to Burns' relationship with his girlfriend, played by Karen Allen, and how he grasps at her as a touchstone to his "normal," straight life that he yearns to return to. However, there is some suggestion that Burns is genuinely piqued by his exposure to homosexuality. He puts on eye makeup and pumps iron while staring in the mirror.

This would be a more interesting area to explore that the film dallies with and then drops.

The most compelling part about "Cruising" is the ambiguous way it treats its murderer. The story ends with the case officially solved, with a gay grad student (Richard Cox) who took a class from a professor who was killed charged as "the guy." However, Ted later turns up dead and the cops blame it on a lovers' quarrel so as not to spoil their case.

What's really interesting is that Friedkin uses three different actors who swap in and out playing the killer or the victims. He's seen as a tall guy in leather cap and sunglasses who likes to do a little playful singsong routine with his victims right before he stabs them with an outsized steak knife.

So the first man killed, a muscular young actor, later plays the killer himself. Cox plays the killer in another murder in Central Park, but appears to be innocent when Burns later lures him into the park and they try to stab each other.

At one point a waiter named Skip (Jay Avocone) is fingered because he works at a steakhouse that uses similar knives and because he has a reputation for liking the rough stuff. Burns initiates a tryst that cops burst in on, arresting them both.

During the interrogation Skip is beaten to a pulp by the police before being released on no evidence. Burns complains this isn't what he signed up for, and nearly quits.

He's also not happy about, for the purpose of continuing the ruse, getting smacked around himself by a huge black cop wearing only a hat and jock strap, in what is surely the film's most completely unhinged moment. This officer is never named and speaks no dialogue, and his outfit is never explained.

There's other portions that show some dirty cops harassing the cross-dressing hustlers, arresting them without cause and forcing them to perform sex acts on them. My guess is the interrogation room cop was trying to instill that same fear.

"Cruising" had its heart in the right place, despite accusations, but its head in the wrong one.

Review: "The Irishman"

Imagine a 3½-hour travelogue of Martin Scorsese’s gangster filmography. There isn’t really anything new, just riding over familiar themes he’s tread on in his other movies, over and over again. You appreciate the nostalgia tour, but in the end that’s all it is.

That’s “The Irishman.”

Heck, I thought the whole goombah thing was played out back in the days of “Casino.” But here we are a quarter century on, reuniting Robert De Niro with Joe Pesci, who was lured out of virtual retirement, and throwing Al Pacino into the mix.

Although their films share a lot of DNA, Pacino has never been in a Scorsese movie before. All four men are in their 70s now, and “The Irishman” very much as the feeling of ‘one last ride with the old gang, while they still can.’

It’s the story of Frank Sheeran, known by that titular nickname for being the only non-Italian high up in the Bufalino crime family centered around Philadelphia. Frank, played by De Niro, was a war hero who became a Teamsters truck driver and later a local chapter president with the backing of Russell Bufalino (Pesci), the mob boss who had pull in most everything, including the union.

The story, written by Steven Zallian (“Schindler’s List”) based on a book by Charles Brandt, follows Frank from the 1950s to the 1970s, with flashbacks to his World War II days and a framing story when he is an elderly man in a nursing home recalling his life -- seemingly to nobody.

There’s also a framing device within the larger one, in which Frank travels with Russ and their wives on a languid road trip to Detroit in 1975, ostensibly to attend a wedding but really to do a little business along the way, including hashing things out with a troublesome ally, former Teamsters boss Jimmy Hoffa (Pacino).

If you know anything about how or when Hoffa died, it’s not too hard to put together the real import of their trip. The subject of Brandt’s book is also well-known, but for those who aren’t familiar I’ll refrain from revealing any spoilers, even if they are glaringly obvious.

The film uses CGI to “de-age” the actors during the earlier sequences, and for the most part it’s effective enough that you don’t notice it after a while. Russ refers to Franks as “the kid” during the 1950s scenes, though even with digital help De Niro looks more like he’s in his 50s than his 30s. Only the World War II stuff looks cringingly fake.

Frank is a very passive guy for a main character; he’s mostly reacting to other people. Pacino gets the limelight as the charismatic, neurotic Hoffa, constantly blustering and schmoozing. Pesci plays the calm guy, quiet guy you have to watch out for.

Essentially, the three legendary actors switched around their stereotypical roles.

There’s some wonderfully rough dialogue, including aphorisms substituted for dark deeds. For instance, Frank first gains his reputation as an assassin, which is known as “painting houses.” (A home’s wall splattered with blood provides the visual cue.) A final judgment on a guy becomes, “It’s what it is.”

But spread out over 209 minutes, when you put it all together the result is a lot of run-on scenes of guys riding around in cars, sitting in bars, having tangential conversations.

"We gotta talk about that thing. I'm a little concerned."
"What thing, that thing?"
"No, the other thing, the one with Tony."
"Big Tony?"
"No, the other Tony."
"Little Tony?"
"No, the other other Tony."
"Oh, so we gotta go paint his house."
"No. Not that."

There’s lots of other characters who flit in and out of the story, too many to name them all. A short list would include Harvey Keitel and Bobby Cannavale as big guys in Russ’ orbit; Sebastian Maniscalco as Joseph “Crazy Joe” Gallo, an upstart who likes clam sauce; Ray Romano as the obligatory mob lawyer; and Stephen Graham as Anthony Provenzano, aka “Tony Pro,” aka “the little guy,” who clashes repeatedly with Hoffa.

The female characters are used more poorly than any other mainstream film of recent vintage I can recall. They’re literally mannequins in the background, seen but rarely heard. Certainly they do not say or do anything pivotal. They do not even age like the men do, though who knows if that’s an aesthetic choice by Scorsese or simply a cutback on the film’s famously sprawling budget.

Scorsese casts Anna Paquin as Frank’s daughter, Peggy, and then gives her nothing to do. She stands witness to Frank’s crimes, but is not gifted with the ability to speak about them. We wait for the final confrontation that never arrives. What a waste of a fine actress.

“The Irishman” isn’t a bad movie -- it’s great-looking and Pacino gives a peppy performance as Hoffa. But it’s an overlong elegy for a time gone by, when mobsters were important figures and people made movies glamorizing them. Expiration dates for both are overdue.

Reeling Backward: "The Panic in Needle Park" (1971)

"You rat up, you don't rat down."
                                     --Detective Hotchner

"The Panic in Needle Park" was Al Pacino's second official screen role, but the first one of any consequence. It's mostly remembered today for that reason, though his co-star, Kitty Winn, actually won the best actress award at the Cannes festival in her own first starring role. But her career faded pretty quickly after this and the "Exorcist" films, and she retired from screening acting in 1978.

It's a pretty staggering performance by Pacino, his screen presence already fully formed and filled with that agitated vigor that would become his hallmark. His Bobby, a low-level street hustler and drug dealer, is a charming sweetheart when there's plenty of heroin to be had, but a manipulative lout when there's a panic -- aka an extended period of short supply.

Decades before "Kids" or "Trainspotting," "Panic" offered a grisly glimpse of drug-addicted youths hanging around Sherman Square Park, a meager finger of vegetation crammed along Broadway on the Upper West Side of New York City. The film was considered very shocking for its day -- it was even banned in several countries -- and is believed to be the first mainstream movie that depicted people injecting themselves with needles.

The nomenclature is a bit dated, as you might expect. Sleeping with someone is "making it" or, in more negative connotations, "balling." Users refer to their product, mostly heroin, as "junk." Or they just use vague references to available quantity: "Got any?" or "I need some." Though they are hesitant to refer to themselves as "junkies," preferring to say they're "chipping" -- using because they want to, not because they need to.

In their universal delusion, everyone is "chipping," especially Bobby and his new old lady.

Seen today, it's an episodic film that rambles through the highs and lows of the junkie lifestyle without a particularly cohesive narrative. It follows the perspective of Helen (Winn), a nice girl from Fort Wayne, Ind., who gradually dissolves into the counterculture, moving downward in association from artists to street scamps to whacked-out users, eventually becoming a prostitute and dealer herself.

Her lowest point, not actually depicted in the movie, is when she sells pills conned out of a doctor to some kids, and is arrested by "Hotch," aka Detective Hotchner (Alan Vint). The local "narco" cop, Hotch wears a leather jacket and long hair, drives around in a beat-up VW Bug and has more or less made Needle Park, aka Sherman Square, his own stomping grounds.

Hotch knows all the junkies, coexists with them on a largely peaceful basis of shared enmity, occasionally busting one of them and using them as leverage against their fellows. There's not much animosity among the ostensible friends, who understand the game and realize there are times they will be ratted out, just as there are times they will be the rat. Occasionally someone disappears from the park for awhile, then turns up again a few months later after their stint in jail is up.

As long as there is heroin and needles to be shared, this squalid form of friendship abides.

Richard Bright, best known as the enforcer Al Neri from the "Godfather" films, turns up as Hank, Bobby's older brother. He's a career criminal himself, but carries himself around wearing suits and a superior smirk. He's chipping too, but doesn't sully himself with handling the junk, sticking to burglaries of high-end apartments.

Hank will clear $600 in a single night (about $3,700 in today's dollars) and brags that he's never been caught, because he breaks toothpicks in the door lock in case the owners come home while he's burglarizing, and he can hop out the fire escape. He tries to help Bobby by bringing him in as a partner, but Bobby overdoses on the night of the job. They try again the next day, but a cop wanders into the alley and Bobby is sent off to the hoosegow for a few months.

During the break, Helen sleeps with Hank to keep her supply of dope rolling. Initially resistant to using, especially after seeing how Bobby turns into an inert zombie while high, she soon becomes a serious addict.

Both Pacino and Winn do impressive jobs playing high, wandering between euphoria and paranoia, with every stop in between. In one of the most memorable scenes, they decide to shoot up in the men's room of the Long Island ferry after buying a puppy on a whim. "I don't wanna be up while you're coming down!" Bobby snarls. He makes her put the whining pup outside the door, which quickly scampers off the edge of the deck and is lost in the swirling drink.

Other notable actors making early stops in their career are Raul Julia and Paul Sorvino. Julia plays Marco, the uncaring artist who got Helen pregnant, forcing her to undergo an unsafe and unsanitary abortion in the film's opening sequence. Bobby, turning up at Marco's studio to sell junk, takes pity on her and treats her kindly. That leads to them hooking up when Marco decamps to Mexico.

Sorvino's part is much smaller, as an agitated john of Helen's during her prostitution phase, who presses charges when she steals $75 out of his wallet.

"Panic" had an interesting genesis. It started out as a photographic essay of real junkies in Sherman Square published in serial form by Life magazine in 1965 by James Mills, who later turned it into a fictionalized novel. Husband-and-wife writing team Joan Didion and John Gregory Dunne ("A Star Is Born") wrote the screenplay after John's brother optioned the rights.

Director Jerry Schatzberg had only made one other film following his own career in photojournalism, and would go on to direct a number of other notable films, including "Honeysuckle Rose" and "Street Smart," which launched Morgan Freeman's career.

Schatzberg goes for a very spare cinema verite style that works well with the film's sober, intimate tone. He even chose to throw out the entire musical score composed by Ned Rorem, relying on street sounds and chatter to from the movie's acoustic background.

"The Panic in Needle Park" isn't a great film in of itself, but it is a notable one worth revisiting. In addition to launching the career of Pacino and a bunch of other people, it depicted without varnish the toll hard drugs exact upon the flesh -- and the souls -- of people who think poison can replace what's missing.

Reeling backward: "The Godfather, Part II"

A great number of film critics and scholars regard the sequel to "The Godfather" as being superior to the original. I am not among them.

The sequel, which came out in 1974 -- a mere two years after the original -- won more Oscars than its predecessor, including Best Picture for both films. It follows the saga of mob boss Michael Corleone (Al Pacino) in 1959 while interspersing the story with flashbacks of his father Vito's arrival in America in 1901 and his rise as a crime lord in 1917-1918.

Each film clocks in at around 200 minutes, making for a pretty long sit. "Part II's" plot unfolds at a much more leisurely pace, but I never find it boring. Alas, my lovely bride did not feel the same way, dozing through long stretches of a recent viewing.

My own take on seeing the movie for probably the 8th or 9th time is that the 1959 sections really sing, while the Vito Corleone stuff is actually a bit draggy. It's amazing to me that Robert De Niro won an Oscar for this role, which I don't consider anywhere near his best performances like "Raging Bull" or "Goodfellas."

It's also interesting that De Niro, who took over the part from Marlon Brando in the first movie (Brando being much too old to play a 25-year-old Vito), makes no attempt whatsoever to take any cues from Brando's portrayal of the character. There's none of the theatrical bombasity or the carefully veiled menace of Brando. Granted, this was supposed to be Vito 30 years earlier, and few men behave in middle age as they did as a young man (and woe to those who do). But I think if you showed each movie to separate audiences who hadn't seen them and told them the two actors were playing the same character, they'd be astonished.

And as much as I think the 1959 sequences with Michael are the strongest part of the movie, they don't anywhere near match the grandiosity of the original. This has mostly to do with the antagonists -- the rival Mafia figures who oppose the Corleone family. They're just not that frightening, or even interesting, as the group from the first movie. The triad of Barzini, Tattaglia and especially Virgil "The Turk" Sollazzo made for worthy adversaries. Plus Sterling Hayden as the imperial police captain. Hyman Roth (Lee Strasberg) is the chief heavy in "Part II," and is so low-key that even his threats seem more like whining.

"Part II" is much more a character study than the original, which is probably why critics like it more. The exploration of the disintegration of Michael's persona has generated a lot of long articles in film periodicals that nobody reads. It's still a terrific movie, but there's a reason "The Godfather Part II" did not hold up with audiences over time. When you say "The Godfather," everyone thinks of Brando.