Galway Advertiser 1995/1995_08_24/GA_24081995_E1_025.pdf 

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O A ' S GUIDE TO G O I N G S O N A N D GOING OUT

The Vision a n d Guts o f Arthur Perm
(First of Two Parts)

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ROADLY S P E A K I N G , t h e r e a r e two k i n d s of film directors : those w h o a r e primarily entertainers , a n d those w h o t r y to use t h e m e d i u m of film t o explore t h e times in which they live t h r o u g h c h a r a c t e r a n d situation. O f course the best directors a r e able to strad dle this divide, at least sometimes. O n e of these directors is A r t h u r P e n n , director of Bonnie a n d Clyde, one of the most p o p u l a r a n d critically-acclaimed films ever t o come out of Hollywood, a n d himself one of the most interesting a n d thoughtful American film-makers of the last forty years, who w a s Galway Film Fleadh's special guest this year. Jeff O'Connell spoke to h i m about his films a n d t h e battles he's had over t h e years with t h e Hollywood system.

For many of those years a remark Arthur Penn once cooked up by a bunch of liars." 'Little Big Man' puncmadc about the kind of films he makes has been all too lured the whole myth of the 'Enrol Flynn' view of the accurate (as well as being a pointed observation about wicked Indians and the noble soldiers and can be seen, in the state of Hollywood): "There hasn't been that much of retrospect, as the first 'revisionist' Western. And market for what 1 can do. I'm not into outer space epics Hollywood haled it. or youth pictures". Yet during this 60's this fiercely inde For five years Penn stayed away from films. Instead pendent and brilliantly original director was able to com he taught a graduate film course at Yale University and bine his personal vision with box-office success in a spent time with his family. But the shadow of violence in handful of some of the very best films to come out of that the United Stales was deepening, even before his with turbulent decade. drawal from film-making. Beginning with T h e Miracle Worker' in 1962, which Always politically active, he had worked as a media won Academy Awards for two actresses known mainly advisor to Robert Kennedy and was devastated when he for their stage work, Anne Bancroft and Patty Duke, and was assassinated in June, 1968, barely three months after an Academy Award nomination Martin Luther King was murdered. for Penn as Best Director, and Then Richard Nixon was elected, the continuing with 'Mickey One' in Vietnam War escalated (In 1969, just 1965, the first film that showed before Little Big Man', Penn made what a fine actor Warren Beatty 'Alice's Restaurant', probably the first was, T h e Chase' in 1966, an film inspired by a song, written by explosive drama of Southern Arlo Guthrie, Woody's son, about the bigotry and violence that drew a draft), the Ohio State National Guard stunning performance from opened fire on student protesters and Marlon Brando and gave that killed two men and a woman, as well fine character actor Robert as wounding many others. Duvall the first of many memo Then there was Watergate. As rable performances, and reach Penn reflects on those years, "what a ing a critical and commercial poisonous stew they were cooking high point with 'Bonnie and out of democracy...Watergate - a Clyde' in 1967, Penn's style of Laurel and Hardy three-reeler if ever move-making defined what there was one." And in 1975 Penn American cinema was capable returned to film-making with what he of in the hands of a director with describes as his "darkest film' and integrity and guts. what, for me, remains, despite some

THEN T E E WAS HR WATERGATE. AS PENN R F E T ON THOSE ELCS YEARS, "WHAT A POISO NOUS STEW THEY WERE COOKING OUT OF DEMOCRACY ...WATERGATE - A LAUREL AND HARDY THREE-REEIER IF EVER T E E WAS ONE. HR
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Yet each of these films walked a tightrope. T h e Miracle Worker cast two rela tive unknowns in the lead roles, and was based on a stage show. 'Mickey One' was really a European film made, rather reluctantly, by a Hollywood studio. T h e Chase', with a script by playwright Lillian Hellman, took a very paundiced look at American society. And even 'Bonnie and Clyde', with its quirky humour side-by-side with a level of violence that few films had dared to present, was initially hated by the major critics. When Penn directed Dustin Hoffman in Little Big Man' in 1979, an episodic story of the American West seen through the eyes of an oddball character sympathet ic to the Indian point of view, the knives came out. As Penn himself admits, "The tone of the whole piece is misanthropic. "Whites', 'Indians' - history is a stew

it..." But he is, and the 'case' becomes an obsession. And the final irony is that, all along Mosby's own personal demons have presented him from seeing what's really been going on. The climax of the film is devastating. 'Night Moves' is a brilliant film. The following year Penn directed T h e Missouri Break' with Marlon Brando and Jack Nicholson. Another twist on the traditional Western (Little Big Man' had been preceded in the late 50's by T h e Lefl-Handed Gun' with Paul Newman playing Billy the Kid like James Dean in 'Rebel Without a Cause'), this had Brando as a bounty hunter after Nicholson's horse thief. Again it was a film that aroused reactions from the critics almost as violent as some of the scenes in the film itself. His career since then has led to an increasing with drawal from the Hollywood 'system'. 'Four Friends' in 1981 was a gentle, semi-autobiographical film that died in the cinema, despite having all the virtues of Penn's more successful films of the 60's; Target' in 1985 reunit ed the director with Gene Hackman in an exciting but rather predictable Cold War thriller, and in 1987 he fol lowed with 'Dead of Winter', another good thriller but not more. 'Penn and Teller Get Killed' in 1989 suffered the MS3^^^kWWWi unimportant flaws, his finest film - indignity of failing to get a release outside the United 'Night Moves', with Gene Hackman. Both critics and States. public disliked it, which is not very surprising. It turned After Galway Film Fleadh Perm headed for South the detective genre inside-out and instead of a neat solu Africa where he is directing a film about that society tion to the mystery, it concentrated on the private detec post-apartheid. It's an independent production, some tive Harry Mosby's (Hackman) doubts about his job as a thing that he feels is the only thing that can save the soul professional 'snooper' and the morally ambiguous world of the cinema. He speaks scornfully of a "movie world he inhabits. regressed into multi-national corporations" with the chief It's a film about secrets and the impossibility of keep emphasis placed on successful balance sheets, and com ing them secret. Its characters are lost, bewildered people mittees made up of people who have no understanding of and this includes Mosby, the one trying to 'solve the cinema as an art form. His loathing for Hollywood, case'. His wife taunts him about his job, accusing him of which began when the editing of his first film. T h e Leftremaining a private detective "so you can pretend you're Handed Gun' , was snatched from him, is a stinging solving something". A woman involved with the case indictment of the crass commercialisation of asks him ironically, "Are you one of those intent-on-the- Schwartzenager-Stallone cinema. When film-makers like Penn and Robert Altman are truth types?" and Mosby replies, "I'm not religious about

consigned to the sidelines, what we are left with may be entertaining but it's certainly lost the integrity of vision that, at its best, raises film into art.

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It is difficult to connect the gentle, soft-spoken, phys ically slight individual I met at the Ardilaun Hotel with the man who claims thai the classic slow-motion deaths that conclude 'Bonnie and Clyde' came to him "like an epiphany. I suddenly just saw how the film had to end It's only as he starts talking about the countless hassles he had to deal with in his unpleasant encounters with a string of Hollywood idiots that you sense the steel beneath the courteous manner. And, in a very different way, when he discusses his films. Arthur Penn was bom in Philadelphia in 1922. and he's not the only member of his family lo win an internation al reputation: his older brother is the distinguished pho tographer, Irving Penn "I really didn't have any aspirations about film when I was a young man. In fact. I paid almost no attention to movies growing up. Our family was so poor I could bare ly afford to go lo them even if I'd wanted to!", he explains, laughing. Life so many potential directors it was seeing Orson Welles' Citizen Kane' that opened his eyes for the first lime to the possibilities of the medium Penn was in the United Stales infantry during the World War II and. as he explained years later, saw enough combat - his unit took part in the bloody cam paign known as the Battle of the Bulge - for il lo have left an enormous impression. When the War finally ended the young Penn look advantage of the opportunities provided by the G.I Bill, in which the U.S. Government would finance a year of] College for every year a soldier had served. "I had four[ glorious years of college, two in the States and two in Europe." His two European years were spent ai the Italian universities of Perugia and Florence, but for the first two he Mended a remarkable small school in North Carolina called Black Mountain College

NEXT WEEK: ARTHUR PENN'S SIXTIES