Among the inmates are Mastroianni, who keeps repeating “What would be nice, I think, would be for us to meet for dinner” until we want to mash a plate of lasagna in his face. He walks about in a bathrobe, smoking a cigarette and inspiring us to wonder how in the world he got into the movies. Really. Mastroianni, one of the most charismatic actors in the world, reduced to a cipher. Hugh Griffith, wearing his usual ferocious whiskers, plays an old tyrant who is forever about to drop dead of a heart attack. Polanski plays another inmate who’s a Ping-Pong buff. Mastroianni and, finally, Miss Rome keep stepping on his Ping-Pong balls and crushing them, which leads to no end of ill feeling. I would desperately like to believe no symbolism is intended.
Miss Rome loses most of her clothes soon after arriving at the villa, and spends half an hour wearing the above-mentioned table napkin around her neck before stealing the tops of Hugh Griffith’s pajamas. Hugh Griffith is provided with dialogue like “Who is that girl wearing my pajama tops?” Another of the residents of the villa paints Miss Rome’s left leg blue. There are a lot of shots of her walking around in pajama tops with a blue leg.
These and other shots confirm my long-held suspicion that, when it comes right down to it, there’s a nasty streak of misogynism in Polanski. “What we have in mind, dear,” I imagine him telling Sydne Rome when he was casting the picture, “is for you to walk around mostly nude for ninety minutes with your left leg painted blue.” What she replied I cannot imagine, but she took the job. Some people will do anything to work for a top director.
You will notice that I have awarded Diary of Forbidden Dreams one half star. There is a principle at work here, and now’s the time to explain it. No movie, no matter how bad, gets no stars at all in the Sun-Times unless it is, in addition to being bad, also meretricious and evil. Diary doesn’t even have the wit to go that extra step.
Dice Rules
(Directed by Jay Dubin; starring Andrew Dice Clay; 1991)
Dice Rules is one of the most appalling movies I have ever seen. It could not be more damaging to the career of Andrew Dice Clay if it had been made as a documentary by someone who hated him. The fact that Clay apparently thinks this movie is worth seeing is revealing and sad, indicating that he not only lacks a sense of humor, but also ordinary human decency.
Andrew Dice Clay comes billed as a comedian, but does not get one laugh from me in the eighty-seven minutes of this film. I do not find it amusing to watch someone mock human affliction, and I don’t find it funny, either, for him to use his fear of women as a subject for humor. Of course any subject can theoretically be made funny, but just to stand and point is not the same thing as developing a humorous point of view.
An example. We have all known someone who has undergone a tracheotomy, having their voice box removed because of cancer. Sometimes these people are still able to speak through controlling the air stream in their throat, or by using small battery-powered devices that magnify their whispers. Andrew Dice Clay finds their speech funny, and mocks it in this film. I imagine that tracheotomy patients themselves use morbid humor as one way of dealing with their condition, but Clay is not using humor at all—he is simply pointing and making fun, like a playground bully.
He has many other targets. The handicapped. The ill. Minorities. Women. Homosexuals. Anyone, in fact, who is not exactly like Andrew Dice Clay is fair game for his cruel attacks. His material about women constitutes verbal rape. Using obscenity as punctuation, he describes women as essentially things to masturbate with.
I think his approach to women is based on fear of them. It is too painful and too consistent to be explained otherwise. Everything that he says about women is based on the kind of ignorant dirty jokes told by insecure teenage boys among themselves, as they try to conceal their misinformation and bolster their courage by objectifying women into creatures who can be dismissed with the usual crude obscenities. Even then, if he were mocking or kidding this attitude, it could perhaps be funny. But not a single word in Clay’s film indicates that he has been able to deal with the fact that women are living, thinking beings. He sees only their sexual organs, fears them, and must punish or conquer them to reassure himself.
Dice Rules was filmed in concert (what a word) at Madison Square Garden, which the comedian was able to fill two nights in a row. It is eerie, watching the shots of the audience. You never see anyone just plain laughing, as if they’d heard something that was funny. You see, instead, behavior more appropriate at a fascist rally, as his fans stick their fists in the air and chant his name as if he were making some kind of statement for them. Perhaps he is. Perhaps he is giving voice to their rage, fear, prejudice, and hatred. They seem to cheer him because he is getting away with expressing the sick thoughts they don’t dare to say.
Comedians have long been a lightning rod for society, drawing down the dangers and grounding them. Some of the most brilliant comics of recent years—Lenny Bruce, Richard Pryor, George Carlin—have dealt with taboo words and concepts. But they bring insight and an attitude to them. They help us see how we regard them. They provide a form of therapy, of comic relief. Not Clay. Strutting and sneering, lacking the graceful timing of the great stand-up talents, reciting his words woodenly, he creates a portrait of the comedian as sociopath.
Crowds can be frightening. They have a way of impressing low, base taste upon their members. Watching the way thousands of people in his audience could not think for themselves, could not find the courage to allow their ordinary feelings of decency and taste to prevail, I understood better how demagogues are possible.
Dirty Dingus Magee
(Directed by Burt Kennedy; starring Frank Sinatra, George Kennedy; 1970)
Dirty Dingus Magee is as shabby a piece of goods as has masqueraded as a Western since, oh, A Stranger Returns. It’s supposed to be a comedy, and it was directed by Burt Kennedy, who is supposed to be a director of Western comedies (Support Your Local Sheriff wasn’t bad), but its failure is just about complete.
I lean toward blaming Frank Sinatra, who in recent years has become notorious for not really caring about his movies. If a shot doesn’t work, he doesn’t like to try it again; he might be late getting back to Vegas. What’s more, the ideal Sinatra role requires him to be in no more than a fourth of the scenes, getting him lots of loot and top billing while his supporting cast does the work.
This time, as usual, the supporting cast is good. We get George Kennedy as a cigar-chewing sheriff; Anne Jackson as a madam of sorts; Lois Nettleton as a sympathetic nymphomaniac, and Jack Elam, naturally, as the villain. They’re fun to watch, but where’s Sinatra? In Vegas?
The movie loosely concerns Sinatra as a con man who. . . . But never mind what the movie’s about; that’s hardly the issue. I want to hurry on to a statement by one Charlie Blackfeet, president of the IFTP (Indians for Truthful Portrayal). Blackfeet is quoted at great length in MGM press releases as saying Dirty Dingus Magee has his organization’s “first unqualified stamp of approval for Hollywood stories dealing with Indians in twenty years.”
Blackfeet, who talks amazingly like an MGM press agent, allows that “Hollywood’s version of the average American Indian has been as artificial as a toupee.” Not a tactful statement where Frank Sinatra is involved. But Blackfeet likes this movie, because it avoids “make-believe jargon that makes Indians sound like a cross between Tarzan and a man making a phone call underwater.” End of press release quotes.