“I can’t tell if you know anything about women,” said Ellen Burstyn to then up-and-coming Martin Scorsese. “No,” he said, “but I’d like to learn.” Martin Scorsese has made his fair share of forgotten great films, drowned out by his unquestionably more popular films about violent and chaotic men. It can be easy to forget that Scorsese has had one of the most varied careers of any director in history, having made films everywhere from the brooding angst-driven Taxi Driver to the touching Hugo. Why some of these films become forgotten isn’t too surprising; Kundun had a pretty niche audience to begin with, King of Comedy was far before it’s time, etc. etc. but one that just doesn’t make any sense at all is Alice Doesn’t Live Here Anymore.

Made when Martin Scorsese was still riding the wave of the success of Mean Streets, Alice Doesn’t Live Here Anymore follows Ellen Burstyn, driving cross-country with her son in hopes of becoming a singer after having, in a way, been freed by the sudden and tragic death of her neglectful husband. The film has it’s fair share of men behaving badly, from Scorsese regular Harvey Keitel to songwriter-turned-actor Kris Kristofferson, but it will push their stories to the side any moment it seems like they might distract from what this film is really about: A mother and her son.

Perhaps I’m just more ignorant about film than I think I am but, while there’s an ever-growing deluge of great films about fathers and sons, I can probably count on one hand films that focus on the other half of that equation. Alice Doesn’t Live Here Anymore is a beautiful and touching and often hilarious movie. As you’d expect from a Scorsese picture, it doesn’t hold back any punches, not shying away from letting things get dark from time to time, but through all that this film has more heart and more optimism than near anything else he’s ever made.

Throughout every moment of Scorsese’s best work is a real presence of the director, not in a stylistic self-aware sense, but in a personal and emotional sense. Like Scorsese, Elia Kazan also primarily worked from material written by others and as he put it: “The director has to restate succinctly the play, its meaning and form, in his own terms; he has to reconceive it as if he had created it. What does it mean to him? What does it arouse in him? How does the manuscript affect his soul?” Of course, directors taking a writer’s work and “changing” it or “mangling and deforming” it, depending on who you ask, is one of the most notorious aspects of filmmaking.

But there’s a difference between the horror stories of once great scripts turned into garbage films, and a director like Scorsese finding a way to make a film that affects him, that represents something about him. Even the greatest director can’t just grab a script and take on faith the deep meaning that piece supposedly holds for the writer, while meaning nothing to himself, and expect to make a great film. What you end up with is poor translation, something that’s empty and flat.

It seems the popular idea today that the director and the camera need to be as objective and unnoticed as they possibly can be. But these kind of limitations are only damaging. Zooms can look amateurish, directorial presence can be obnoxious and pretentious, but stripping tools from one’s toolbox can only ever hinder one’s pursuit of making great work. Directors like Scorsese, or Kubrick, or Cassavetes, or Leone, would use anything they believed they had at their disposal to make the greatest films that they possibly could. They were daring.

In Alice Doesn’t Live Here Anymore, Scorsese flexes all his usual muscles; his feel for music, his love for classic movies, his willingness to throw the script out and let great actors improvise, you see him do it all. Like one of Scorsese’s films that did find an audience, Raging Bull, this film is both brutal in its emotional honesty and not afraid to be creative with it’s editing or stylistic choices as long as they fulfil a purpose. In Alice Doesn’t Live Here Anymore, Martin Scorsese uses every tool in his toolbox. He puts everything on the table and, in this case, gives us one of the greatest films he’s ever made.

Someday I’ll commission a salt & pepper shaker set, one a bust of Midnight Cowboy and Serpico screenwriter Waldo Salt, the other of Robert Redford’s barnstorming pilot Waldo Pepper. Waldo Salt, 1914 – 1987, wrote some of the greatest screenplays ever produced. He was, without a doubt, one of the finest screenwriters ever to live.

He wasn’t an immigrant from the theatre like Paddy Chayefsky or Robert Bolt. He wasn’t a behind-the-scenes repairman of faltering scripts like Robert Towne, famous “doctor” of The Godfather, Bonnie & Clyde, Marathon Man and more. He wasn’t a novelist turning to the pictures for a quick buck like James Salter or William Faulkner. Waldo Salt began in the cinema, under the tutelage of Joseph L. Mankiewicz, and remained there until his death, only once nearly broken by the Communist-paranoid Hollywood Blacklist.

At the time of the Blacklist, Waldo Salt was rising fast. He’d had a hit with The Flame and the Arrow and had enjoyed plenty of critical acclaim ever since his first produced original, the Shopworn Angel, released when he was just 24. He was on the verge of a directing career when the Blacklist finally caught up with him, and for the next ten years he’d have his name taken from him.

He assumed that of his then wife “M. L. Davenport”. It didn’t work. Only one film written during his time on the Blacklist would ever see the light of day, and that was something he only contributed narration for. That was 1961’s Blast of Silence. When the Blacklist broke, and Waldo Salt was at last able to attach his own name to his work, he discovered more damage had been done than was immediately apparent.

Salt wasn’t finally reclaiming his career as if it had been put on ice for a decade. He was getting his name back just to discover he didn’t have a career anymore. The first three films he wrote after not being able to use his own name for near a decade were films he’d later refer to as “Perhaps the three worst pictures I think I’ve ever seen.” He’s not wrong. Taras Bulba, Flight from Ashiya and Wild & Wonderful are three spectacularly bad films.

He’d had, in 1951 when his name was placed on the Blacklist, lost the vocation he’d been using to support his family. The weight of that burden made sure writing couldn’t possibly mean anything other than a way to make a living. By the mid-60’s, he was living alone in a tiny apartment in the dingy Paris Hotel stricken with pneumonia. It was there, watching her father cough his lungs out whilst sitting on a bed barely wide enough to sleep on, that Waldo’s daughter told him: “You know, none of us would really mind if you were writing something you really cared about.”

He’d forgotten why he started writing in the first place. He began to take his time. He purposefully built a reputation as a slow writer, willing to take the time to get his work just as he thought it needed to be. He would become known as the writer who’d sooner deliver you a 400-page screenplay three months late, than something you could go out tomorrow and shoot. But those 400 pages would be the best 400 pages you’d ever read.

What made Waldo Salt so singular and important was the way he approached stories. While his path wasn’t unique, he was undoubtedly the best at his game. Instead of approaching material the way the Paddy Chayefskys of the world did, by way of the “idea” or “theme, Waldo would approach it through the characters and their deepest, almost sub-conscious needs. Joe Buck’s need for physical affection. Ratso Rizzo’s need for a friend. Bob Hyde’s need for purpose.

He was a hugely empathetic writer. In Serpico he infused just as much of his own experience and emotions into the characters that Frank Serpico found himself battling against as Frank himself. Whether it was Joe Buck, Ratso Rizzo, Frank Serpico, Luke Martin or Bob Hyde, Waldo Salt studied outcasts. His writing was always, from the very beginning, not primarily concerned with introspection, but instead with desperately trying to understand the people around him.

When asked in a Q&A “What is the fundamental need of the character Waldo Salt?” Waldo isn’t sure how to answer. He pauses, um’s and ah’s. Finally he replied: “That’s quite fascinating… I’ve never thought of this…”

This is the coolest film I’ve ever seen. From the pulsating, bassy, synth drenched soundtrack, to the gripping heist sequences, to the neon lit night-time cinematography, this is the film Nicholas Winding Refn’s Drive wished it was. Led by a top-of-his-game James Caan, Thief is the first film by Michael Mann and it is one of the greatest debut films I’ve ever seen.

Starting with perhaps Terrence Malick’s Badlands in 1973, the floodgates seemed to open giving us over the next few years some of the best debut films ever released. With films like Badlands, Ridley Scott’s The Duellists and Michael Mann’s Thief, I’d argue this period has never been topped. Not even by the rise of the independents in the 90’s.

That said though, the folk who burst out onto the stage in the 70’s and early 80’s came from different places than the video-store-clerks of Quentin Tarantino and film-school-grads of Wes Anderson. Terrence Malick had of course been a pretty well-to-do screenwriter, doing uncredited rewrites on things like Dirty Harry (and when you’re called onto the same project as John Milius, I’d be pretty flattered). Ridley Scott had done all manner of work for British TV before becoming a highly sought after ad director (a path David Fincher would later also take). And finally Michael Mann, the man who’d later make the most underrated Hannibal Lecter film, finally put Al Pacino and Robert De Niro face to face and give us one of the all-time best Tom Cruise performances, got his start making TV movies… like that other “Steven Spielberg” guy.

Watching Mann’s TV movie, the Jericho Mile, it’s no real surprise that he would go far. Like Steven Spielberg’s Duel, it’s a TV movie only by happenstance. Set in Folsom Prison and shot in Folsom Prison in amongst the real prison population, it’s here that the first seeds of Thief were planted. Michael Mann: “It probably informed my ability to imagine what Frank’s life was like, where he was from, and what those 12 or 13 years in prison were like for him… An outsider who has been removed from the evolution of everything from technology to the music that people listen to, to how you talk to a girl, to what do you want with your life and how do you go about getting it.”

Thief is incredibly daring. The opening scene, one of the greatest of all-time if you ask me, has James Caan break into a safe, a real safe. Tangerine Dream soundtrack thumping, cinematography dark, and James Caan slowly turning this huge whirring magnetic drill into a $10,000 safe bought just to be broken into. I won’t spoil it here, but there’s a video put up by the Criterion Collection where James Caan talks about shooting this scene and I gotta say it’s all the more impressive having seen that… But watch the movie first.

I could spend the rest of the article listing off each element that this film absolutely nails. I could ramble on about Tangerine Dream’s score, Donald Thorin’s cinematography, the performances by James Caan, Tuesday Weld, Robert Prosky, Willie Nelson, and on and on and on… But what I really have to mention is just how tight the screenplay is. The dialogue is some of the sharpest I’ve heard in a long time, made all the better by the fact that the dialogue seems to belong solely to this film. These aren’t jokes or “cool lines” that could be ripped out and shoved into any heist film, the lines belong completely to the characters that speak them.

Michael Mann’s Thief feels absolutely fresh. It’s one of the most modern and cool films I’ve ever seen. Michael Mann, like the 1960’s Batman series or King of the Hill as odd as those parallels may be, knew exactly who he was right out of the gate. Michael Mann, as far as he’s letting any of us now, was brilliant from the start.

A new version of The Lion King was announced back in September last year and we were wondering who Jon Favreau would hire to voice the main characters. We now know two of the cast, with James Earl Jones as Mufasa and Donald Glover taking over the role of Simba.

Jones, of course, voiced Mufasa in the 1994 animated film, and there’s really no one else you can hear saying the character’s lines and Glover, who has been on a roll recently after securing the part of young Lando Calrissian in the Han Solo film and winning awards for his TV series Atlanta is more than able to bring the needed energy to his role as Simba.

While it has been called the “live-action” Lion King (there are, after all, no human characters, and all the animals will be brought to life using the technical effects used on Favreau’s Jungle Book), we can only imagine how heartbreaking it will be to see this new version on Mufasa pass away. I don’t think I’m ready to relive my childhood trauma. The new film doesn’t yet have a release date but we will wait in eager anticipation.

D. A. Pennebaker’s “Dont Look Back” is screening next Monday the 27^th with the Rolling Stones documentary “Gimme Shelter” at the Astor Theatre.

Show this film to anyone who dares treat any artist like one constant, unchanging identity. Anyone who believes that Shakespeare is just Shakespeare, that Carver is just Carver. Dont Look Back catches Bob Dylan just as he, already a cultural icon, was beginning down what would be remembered as the most controversial road he ever took: Turning electric.

Although the film was made before this actually happened, looking back at it in retrospect makes it seem almost as if Pennebaker and Dylan are trying to tell us “See? It was always going to happen!” like stacking up a mountain of evidence. This is a restless and perhaps terrified Bob Dylan tearing down a myth as recklessly and as violently as he possibly can.

Directed by D. A. Pennebaker, this film catches its subject walking a tight rope. In one scene we see Dylan yowling like Guthrie into a microphone with an acoustic guitar in front of an old flatbed truck out in wheat fields. And in another, in dark sunglasses acting all too cool, posturing around a young Donovan in a hotel room cluttered with reporters and sycophants. He seems bored, maybe. Definitely frustrated.

I’ve always been hugely frustrated with the idea that any artist at the beginning of their career could be expected to be at all like they are at the end. Early Stanley Kubrick is a far stretch from Late, same for Bellow, same for Roth, same for Neil Young, who once in an interview with Charlie Rose paraphrased Bob Dylan saying “I’ve heard Bob Dylan say that he doesn’t know who wrote those songs any more” and how could he? How could a 40 year old Bob Dylan, a 50, a 60 year old Bob Dylan, be anything close to a 20 year old?

D. A. Pennebaker is often credited as being one of the pioneers of the Cinema Verite movement of “direct observational cinema”. It’s an important thing to note that Pennebaker never for one moment pretended that his subjects could forget he was there, that he had any chance of disappearing into the wallpaper. The camera’s never forgotten and that’s an unavoidable truth that Pennebaker exploits it as far as it can be taken. The camera just sticks around, it doesn’t let the subjects rest, eventually becoming just another personality for the subject to try and impress.

Bob Dylan was said to have been pretty mortified after seeing a rough cut of Pennebaker’s film, it having left him feeling pretty rotten about how that film seemed to make him appear. Perhaps he’d started to believe the crap his rabid fans and adoring press kept spewing about this noble moral messenger… Although I doubt it. It was this point he realised that it didn’t matter, just like everything else he did, it was all part of an act. It was all just as fake as anything else.

This is what’s special about Pennebaker’s film: Not that it shows an uninhibited look at the behind-the-scenes Bob Dylan, but instead that we see a legendary self-mythologiser mastering that craft. There are those figures in the culture like Joan Didion, Ayn Rand, Ernest Hemingway or Bob Dylan that understand that their public persona is as much a character to be invented and presented and utilized as the work they’re more famous for. Although, how rare is it that we’re ever given a chance to see these folks actually inventing these public personas?

Recently restored by the Criterion Collection with a fantastic 4K scan, there’s never been a better time to see it. So go, see it.

Nicholas Ray’s Johnny Guitar was made just as Hollywood was beginning to, very slowly, resemble the system we have today. The days of screenwriters all locked up together in a script farm of bungalows, of directors being forced to hand their films over to editors they may well never meet like a factory production line, and where studio tyrants like Louis B. Meyer wrote long and strict rulebooks for filmmakers to adhere to seemed to be ending.

It’s at this time, in the early 1950’s, that the identity or style of a film began to be tied more to the director than to the studio. While once people identified an “RKO picture” or an “MGM picture” as a brand, now they began to recognize a “Billy Wilder” or a “John Huston” or a “Frank Capra” picture. “Cinema is Nicholas Ray” said Jean-Luc Godard. Nicholas Ray, of Rebel Without a Cause fame, is astounding for just how singular in style and form his films were, even though they were made when the Studio System still reigned supreme.

He made exciting action films like Flying Leathernecks with John Wayne, haunting Film Noir flicks like In A Lonely Place with Humphrey Bogart, and films like Bigger Than Life with James Mason that I swear is a distant uncle of Martin Scorsese’s Taxi Driver… but through all of these, nothing else was quite like Johnny Guitar.

Nicholas Ray’s Trucolor Western, starring Joan Crawford, Stirling Hayden, a very young Ernest Borgnine and the holy-crap-why-have-I-never-seen-her-before Mercedes McCambridge, is guaranteed not to be like any Western you’ve ever seen. It’s hyper-vivid colour palette and almost fantastical set design hits you immediately, but what soon takes the lead is the power of the script.

I was knocked out at the first confrontation between Joan Crawford and her nemesis played by Mercedes McCambridge. The strength of their performances carries the film throughout, helped no doubt by the fact that they apparently could not stand each other at all, so much so that Nicholas Ray said that mutual loathing was “heaven sent”.

While Nicholas Ray and screenwriter Ben Maddow play freely with the tropes of the Western genre, they do so not without taking a step to the left, and not without elevating it all so that every single element feels purposeful, put there to serve a greater message…

So, what’s that message? Johnny Guitar follows Joan Crawford’s saloonkeeper “Vienna” as she comes head to head with mistrusting townsfolk, scared of the change that Vienna and the coming railway represent. They are blinded by hate for what they don’t understand anything of other than that it promises to upend the way things always have been and ought to always be.

This witch-hunt serves as a perfect metaphor for the real-life Blacklist that tormented its screenwriter. Ben Maddow’s name is nowhere to be seen in Johnny Guitar, instead, Philip Yordan’s name’s the one up for all to see. Maddow, like Waldo Salt, Dalton Trumbo, Ring Lardner Jr. and dozens of others, fell ill of the almost-too-satirically-titled “House Un-American Activities Committee” set up to make sure anyone who’d ever, for even just an afternoon, bore communist sympathies would never work again.

Johnny Guitar was made right at the height of this when the names on the list just kept stacking up and stacking up and stacking up. “A lot of people didn’t find work, some people died, some people committed suicide,” Waldo Salt said later “I wish that we had done something to deserve us being blacklisted, I wish we had that much influence on film, or on the politics of the time… but we didn’t.” People from all professions within Hollywood were affected, they had to take on other names, move to television, or leave the country to have any hope to work again. This didn’t end until finally, Dalton Trumbo had his name up on the big screen again with Otto Preminger’s Exodus in 1960.

Johnny Guitar is a time capsule holding a style of filmmaking long gone, one of Joan Crawford’s best performances, a criminally underrated actor in Mercedes McCambridge, a connection to no question the darkest chapter in Hollywood’s history and so much more… Something makes me think that maybe, with the social climate at the moment, a film like Johnny Guitar might just be becoming relevant again.

WRITTEN BY :  Tom May

The Great Waldo Pepper, directed by George Roy Hill and written by William Goldman, is a film I only discovered a couple of years ago and man, do I wish I had it as a kid.  Just like how Raiders of the Lost Ark made me want to be an archaeologist, and Spider-Man made me want to be bitten by a spider, The Great Waldo Pepper made me wish I were a pilot.

Like Howard Hughes’s Hell’s Angels, The Great Waldo Pepper is worth a watch for the spectacular stunts alone. Released in 1975, the film follows Robert Redford as a pilot right when the magic of flying seemed to be wearing off, seeming more and more normal to his flock of potential customers. This is the end of what was called “Barnstorming”, where pilots would travel from town to town, taking passengers for rides, always willing to show off.  Made, obviously, without the helping hand of computer generated effects, I can’t think of any other film where you’ll see Robert Redford wing-walk on a bi-plane at 6,000 feet with no parachute. The stunts here start at edge-of-your-seat and only get more impressive as the two-hour film continues on.

A bit of a warning: if you’ve tried Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid and found you’re a heartless misery-guts who can’t handle something that twee and sentimental, then maybe The Great Waldo Pepper isn’t for you… Because if ever there were one big twee, sentimental with a touch of the bittersweet cornball film, this is it.

But that’s Goldman’s trick. He did it in Butch Cassidy and he’s done it here. He pulls you in with just how fun everything is, all the more exciting with the ever-charismatic Robert Redford taking the wheel, and then he hits you smack in the face. William Goldman is a master of the kind of Hollywood fakery that had been perfected by the likes of Billy Wilder. Stories that are, from the way the characters speak to the relatively straightforward way the stories unfold, total artifice and not pretending to be otherwise. But within that artifice is a core of real emotional truth, reality where it really counts.

In interviews, William Goldman is notoriously down on his own writing and The Great Waldo Pepper certainly hasn’t swung clear of his ire. He’s said he would never have written it if George Roy Hill hadn’t been so into planes, but this isn’t a script written by someone uncaring of the story or its characters. Goldman is one of the few screenwriters who’s ever flawlessly walked the tight-rope between light-heartedness and tragedy. It’s something he attempted here again and, admittedly, in Waldo Pepper it’s a harder pill to swallow.

Hill and Goldman seem to have tried their best to establish the stakes and danger of the film’s premise. The opening shots show a wall covered in black and white photos of pilots, their ages beneath, all implied to have died young. But that doesn’t soften the impact when, around halfway through the picture, death brutally enters. Goldman’s talked of how one particular moment in the film seemed to have been taken by the audience as a betrayal, too dark for what they thought the first half had promised them.

But while Goldman may think this is where he failed, I think this is exactly where Waldo Pepper succeeds. It took me back to when I was a kid, when I was watching Star Wars, or James Bond, or Indiana Jones for the first time and I was still learning the classic story tropes, everything was still a discovery, not a thing came already expected. Waldo Pepper doesn’t wear its twists and its subversions like badges of honour, none of that on-the-nose Avant Garde genre-breaking attitude you tend to get. It’s just an exciting adventure and one that’s still surprising and unexpected no matter your age.

Written By Tom May

Les Underwood (John Brumpton) greatly enjoys taking all sorts of goods from customers desperate for money – after all, it is a great business. With the help of Danny (Damian Hill), his softly spoken but loyal employee, Les runs the pawnbroker store that sees an odd range of customers throughout the day.

Pawno celebrates the diversity seen in Australia, but often neglected in Australian film, and the ensemble cast all have their own story to tell. This is both a strength and a weakness of this film. By introducing so many complex characters, it struggles to give audiences in-depth look at each one. This is exemplified by Paige (Daniel Frederiksen), who is a transwoman introduced early in the film, but not to be seen again until the closing scenes. Paige enters the pawnshop needing money to take her sons to the new superhero film on the weekend. She still suffers from the stigma of being trans, and hides her tears from the abuse she took in the street. There is enough exposure of Paige for audiences to get invested in her character, but she disappears from the film soon after her introduction, to be replaced by equally interesting characters with unsatisfactory coverage. The film aims to tell the story of everyday Australians, but these convoluted subplots struggle to give an overarching meaning to the film.

Although it has structural issues, Pawno is still greatly enjoyable. It is unashamedly Australian, and its dark humour is appealing to the wider Australian audience. It is not an arthouse film that everyday viewers would find confusing or pretentious, and it has the makings to be commercially successful. The banter between Carlo (Malcolm Kennard) and Pauly (Mark Coles Smith) is riotously entertaining, particularly their dismal attempts to pick up. The cast is excellent, and their performance ensures the film is able to reach its potential. The film captures the essence of Footscray, an inner-western Melbourne suburb, and it is refreshing to see the film embrace the urban lifestyle in Australia, rather than the typical outback film. Its cinema run has finished, so hopefully Hill and Ireland organise a DVD or online release. Otherwise, Pawno will risk joining the list of forgotten Australian films, and that would be a real shame.

Written by T.B.

Database Productions is excited to introduce it’s newest documentary series “Racey” that is due to begin production this month.

Racey explores the issue of Interacial Relations both in Australia and abroad, in the context of intimate relationships. How are these relationships perceived? How do our families react? How does it affect the relationship? Why are people so afraid of something different?

We take a close look at the struggles faced by these couples in their daily lives and how hard it can be to overcome racial prejudice, even in the face of something as pure as love. We ask the hard questions but try to encourage honest communication and growth, we are one world, yet still remain so separated and in a country as multicultural as Australia, why is this even something to be questioned?

This production is an open interview style documentary and although we currently have a full list of participants if you are also interested in taking part, feel free to email info@thedatabase.com.au for more information we would warmly welcome any new participants that are passionate about this topic, to speak either in a couple or on your own.