Dick Charleston [David Niven]: You mean suicide?
Jamesir Bensonmum: Oh no, it was murder, all right. Mrs. Twain HATED herself.
With this blog's previous entry being called "Alec Guinness' Basement," and Philip Seymour Hoffman continuing to gather raves for his performance in Capote, I found myself today thinking about that delightful old chestnut, Murder By Death. The movie, now almost thirty years old, was penned by Neil Simon, and it was a spoof of those drawing-room mysteries typical of the pre-WW2 period. The premise: five famous detectives are invited to a spooky old mansion for a meal and, they soon discover, an evening of murder and mayhem, hosted by the ever-eccentric Lionel Twain, played by a feyer-than-fey Truman Capote. As you might expect from a Simon script, the movie is less satire than pastiche, but it's also a movie whose fingerprints I keep seeing in most forms of contemporary comedy from Airplane! to Family Guy, fingerprints arguably more pronounced than those of, say, Mel Brooks' Young Frankenstein or Blazing Saddles. Bring your encyclopedic memory for cultural references in with you, but leave the rest of your brain at the door: that's the movie's injunction as it seats you and prepares you for the gaudiness to come. When James Coco, in his take on Hercule Poirot, insists-- half-indignant, half-victimized-- declares "I'm not a Frenchie, I'm a BELGIE!", you know exactly what you're in for. Noel Coward this isn't.The strength of the movie, though, was and remains its cast: Peter Falk, Peter Sellers, David Niven, Maggie Smith, Elsa Lanchester, Nancy Walker, and at the centre of it all, Alec Guinness as the blind butler Bensonmum, the greeter of the various detectives and their escorts. Guinness is especially fun to watch, first in his drollery, then in his silly miscommunications with the deaf-and-dumb maid played by Walker; and eventually comes the real
treat, a miniature tour-de-force of silliness that culminates with Guinness proving that he can outfey the already overly-fey Capote, and doing so seamlessly. It's a flight of minor genius made slightly more ironic by the fact that the film he followed this with was Star Wars, as if this was one last incarnation of his Ealing days before he was forever pigeonholed as Obi-Wan Kenobi. There are even a few seconds of accidental footage in which it seems Peter Sellers is caught admiring his onetime mentor's performance, savouring the simultaneous campiness and wryness of it all. It's a shame that IMDB's quotes page does not include Guinness' final scene in its entirety; but suffice it to say that there's nothing quite so weird as hearing Guinness utter the words "That's what you think, big boy." The rest of the cast is good to adequate, some (Falk, Niven, Smith) coming off better than others (Sellers, stuck parodying Charlie Chan as Fu Manchu), but there's a distinct pleasure that comes from watching such a collection of fine actors working with one another. That pleasure, though, led me to the disquieting realization that all but five of the thirteen stars of the film are now dead, with only Richard Narita, Eileen Brennan, James ("That'll do, Pig") Cromwell, Peter Falk, and the impossibly-luminous Maggie Smith remaining. Try as films might now to compile impressive casts (c.f., just about any Robert Altman film, including Gosford Park, or Kenneth Branagh's overripe Hamlet), they just don't seem to engender the same sense of larkishly serendipitous coordination. More to the point, though, I think there's no longer any extent to which watching "great casts" seems to connect us with brighter days of cinema. Somehow, now, we're in Norma Desmond's world in which the pictures got small, as bloated and as over-budget as they may be. Murder By Death connected us with the 30s, with Elsa Lanchester especially recalling that golden age in which she was the Bride of Frankenstein. The best we can do these days? A CGI-enhanced Christopher Lee appearing for a few minutes in a Peter Jackson or a George Lucas film-tome. The connections seem weaker, the continuity less valid and less comforting. God love her, but Maggie Smith only seems to take us so far back, though I can't entirely explain why. As Sidney Wang (Sellers) says, "Answer simple, but question very hard."
I was lucky, in a way. I grew up in the eighties, when it was still common to see TV stations airing black-and-white films, if only as regular time-filler. I could see Warner Oland do Charlie Chan without having to hunt for the flicks, or pray they might get an odd airing on TVO. Since the 90s, though, you just don't see the old movies, and the old actors, unless they're attached to unique circumstances, like watching It's A Wonderful Life a hundred-billion-gazillion times come Christmas season. We lose the references, we lose the faces and the history, we lose the konwledge that allows us to observe ironies and play, just as most of the people commenting on Murder By Death on IMDB could only see Alec Guinness as a Jedi sage, and not, for example, as the man who once played eight different roles in the same movie (Kind Hearts and Coronets, 1948) at a time when this was a genuine tour-de-force.
We lose perspective as much as we do history, but we lose too much more. There is no actor these days of whom I can think that even vaguely reminds me of David Niven, that particular figure of class and ease; try as Ewan McGregor has, he could not do in three films what Alec Guinness did in half of one; and I cannot find it anything but ironic that only Peter Falk could ape Bogart without simply becoming an aper of him. Perhaps I look back with a discolouring sense of nostalgia, and perhaps I privilege the past, but strange, isn't it, how even reflecting just a little on a small little film, a small guffaw in time with no social purpose whatsoever, can make one haw on where we are going and where we have been. In the meantime, go find Murder By Death, if you can find it, and enjoy the silliness. Somehow, I'm sure it'll do you good.
There's also 
I should apologize to those of you that have been worrying about the Not-So-Good Doc, but I would also like to assure everyone that I am adequate and alive but just otherwise blasé about blogging or emailing. Occasionally I intrude, and I go silent; this is just me. This should also be nothing new to my regular readers, the Doc being as miserable and cantankerous as he is prone to be, and so silence is the better part of discretion. The Dawk, after all, is no 
American writers, it seems, have seen the enemy, and it is 
August.... Such a wonderful word, but such a lousy month, as I've said before and will likely say many, many times again. September, like a ditch in 
(Chicken Run)
... but some of you might want to reconsider calling yourselves 
Unbelievable: it seems that 
)
Lucas, it should be said, understood Kurosawa's samurai better than Tarantino does (or chooses to). Think of the blink-and-it's-over violence of Alec Guinness slicing off the arm of the threatening alien in the bar at Mos Eisley: that's another example, among many, of Lucas channelling Kurosawa, and Guinness half-designed against Mifune's model, though Guinness may not have realized it. Shame, I think, Lucas moved away from this in his subsequent films. One of the most startling scenes in Kurosawa comes at the end of Sanjuro, with Mifune facing off against his primary foe, the equally mercenary but more Machiavellian Muroto (Tatsuya Nakadai, who eventually played Lord Hidetora in Kurosawa's version of King Lear in 1984's haunting Ran). Muroto insists upon a duel, and once the duel is accepted, the two stand toward one another, motionless. It almost seems as if the two will not engage-- but a flash of motion, an explosion of blood, and it's over. The genius is in the shock, in the "what-the" effect aswe replay in our minds what happened, and so it preys more upon our imaginations. We've seen it, seen it all, but did we miss something? It's almost an inversion of Mr. Eliot's note about having the experience but missing the meaning: we've been jolted with the meaning, and we're left wondering if something escaped us, eluded us, tricked us. But this is how death happens, even when we know it's coming, the result synergistic of what preceded it. In Star Wars, Lucas understood this, though he came to forget it; Sergio Leone, and to some extent, Misters Hitchcock and Peckinpah understood it, too. In Kurosawa's films, this is constant, and it keeps his films, particularly his satires, as sharp as the finest samurai swords. All the better to lacerate you with, my dears.
Kurosawa, beyond being visually arresting and intellectually provocative, always instilled his movies with a kind of epic passion that somehow manages to traverse even those circumstances in which he seems to underplay or minimize such tendencies. I remember arguing with a onetime professor of mine about Kurosawa and Eisenstein, he preferring the latter, but for me the question is a no-brainer: Eisenstein was all style and intellect, a cinematic polymath too often desperate to show it (see also Tarantino); Kurosawa had style and intellect, too, but his films always had heart, emotional and visceral dimensions tangible enough to address more universal concerns. Kurosawa's comic touches work, and they never seem intrusive or indulgent, unlike Eisenstein's awkward and often haughty attempts at same, or Tarantino's clever but often onanistic digressions. In this regard, although Tarantino would surely object, I see QT not as the heir to the directors of low-pop films of drive-in theatres, but as the new Eisenstein, all style and no heart, encyclopedic in so many ways, but his films finally being as thin as the walls in a Virginia Woolf novel. Kurosawa had a major contemporary, David Lean, both of them masters of humanizing tales of epic sweep and infusing them with subtle humour, but I cannot think of a legitimate heir to his throne. (Nor can I think of an heir to Mifune's, most Tough Guy Heroes since too cardboard to qualify.) Perhaps this says more about me than it does anything else, but Kurosawa's 17th century Japan seems more vivid and more substantial than Eisenstein's 1910s, or even Tarantino's 1990s. Eisenstein's and Tarantino's worlds seem too artificial by half, too baroque or mock-baroque to cut to the guttural and guttable quick, though Reservoir Dogs is a significant exception to this. Kurosawa could do High Style as well as anyone, but he knew better than to make style his top priority, and his best films are glorious balancing acts between style and emotional-and-intellectual content. In many ways, Kurosawa is the filmmaker who has come closest to genuinely Shakespearean sensibilities, though thankfully without a Hamlet quagmire that would have debilitated his sense of action. No wonder his Shakespearean affinities were with Macbeth (Throne of Blood) and Lear (Ran): it's one thing to contemplate action, it's another to let deliberation become the action in itself. The guttural and guttable quick awaits. 
Why mention this now?, you're probably asking. Well, it seems Rob Schneider (to describe him as Evil would be redundant) made the mistake of having one of those stupid SuperVillain moments. And Roger Ebert has come out