It bodes ill when a film opens with the lead
character sitting in his therapist's office complaining about something that
has happened in the very recent past. The viewer already has the feeling that
they missed something. That they're not in on a joke, a story, a fairy tale.
Catching up with the tale may be "Inconceivable!"Sorry. I just had to sneak that in. In
Rifkin's Festival the "annoying neurotic" is back.Here, not portrayed by Woody Allen in the
role but by great character actor Wallace Shawn (hence the "Princess
Bride" reference). He does the genre proud.
Reminiscent of "Manhattan", the
film centers around the relationship between Mort Rifkin (Wallace Shawn), a
failed novelist who pines over the days he was happiest - teaching cinema, and
the much younger, former student he's married to - Sue (Gina Gershon). The
action takes place at the San Sebastian Film Festival in Spain. Sue, a
publicist, represents a much-lauded French film director, Philippe (Louis
Garrel), who's new film is the talk of the festival. One can't help but think
about another Allen film "Stardust Memories" wherein Allen, as
director Sandy Bates, attends a retrospective festival of his films, complains
the whole time and has his hands full with multiple women and memories.
One of this film's problems was just
described. Much of what we see and hear we've heard before from this director.
I don't think there are many poor Woody Allen films but this just doesn't stand
up. The characters are caricatures. Philippe is a handsome, charming, shallow,
lothario. A reporter at the post- screening Q&A states: "There's a
rumor that you had an affair with the French Minister's wife." Philippe
replies: "I heard that same rumor, yea" to the laughter of the female
reporters.
Philippe and Mort do not get along. Mort
suspects his wife has a "crush" on her client. Mort is ignored during
the uncomfortable times the three spend together. Running into an acquaintance
at the festival, he discovers his wife lied to him about what she was doing and
was seen by the acquaintance walking on the beach with Philippe.
Eventually the stress scares Mort into
thinking he may be having a heart attack. Another acquaintance gives him the phone
number of a cardiologist and Mort makes an appointment. To Mort's surprise, Dr.
Jo Rojas turns out to be a gorgeous woman (Elena Anaya) whom Mort develops a
crush on. And off we go. He finds every excuse he can to get to the lovely
doctor's office and avoid his wife and Philippe.
Likeable characters here are few and far
between. It's a film festival; what's to be expected? An early scene when Sue
and Mort arrive in time for Philippe's post-screening Q&A is peppered with
quick bon mots such as this between a director and a lovely actress: "In
my new movie about the Eichmann trial you would be PERFECT to play Hanna
Arendt."Two gentlemen: "You
know tonight at eight o'clock there's a special screening of an old Three
Stooges movie. The director's cut." Female reporter to a porn star:
"In the movie were all your orgasms special effects?"
Philippe is asked by a besotted female
reporter: "...War is hell; and you came out and said it." To which the vapid director replies: "Well you
know, some wars are good and some wars are bad, and sometimes wars are
justified."When asked what his
next film will be he responds: "Well, in my next film I'm taking on the
turmoil in the Middle East... and, uh, (crossing his fingers) hopefully, uh,
offer some solution for reconciliation between the Arabs and Israel." Yikes!
Woody Allen hasn't lost his sense of irony or
his desire to tilt at the windmills of hypocrisy, deflate over inflated egos
and rage against the tripe that movie-goers will rave over. He's kind of
misplaced his through line however. Maybe, and I may be wrong, he's taking a
poke at all of today's blockbusters. With them there's barely a plot, no
subplot, only a couple of lines of dialogue to get to the violent (but
bloodless) action. Music video directors suddenly becoming the latest
"artiste" or "enfant terrible." Yes, MCU and DC, he's
aiming at you.
This film is predictable by half. However, there are some great moments; i.e.
when Dr. Jo gives Mort a tour of San Sebastian. Her car gets a flat. There's no
spare. They walk and hitch to the home/studio she shares with her philandering
artist husband Tomás (Enrique Arce) to catch him in in flagrante delicto with
one of his models. Arce's breakdown is a treat to watch.
Terrific performances in short roles and
scenes are offered up by Richard Kind and Nathalie Pozza as Mort's parents and
Christoph Walz as Death with a chessboard. Yea... Ingmar Berman makes an
appearance in another Woody Allen film. As I've related; we've seen a lot of
this stuff before.
Despite the film’s flaws, there are worse
ways to spend ninety minutes. Like most Woody Allen films, this is well cast
and well performed. In a case of life imitating art (or possibly the other way ‘round),
"Rifkin's Festival" was first screened at the San Sebastian Film
Festival in September of 2020 and released in Spain a few weeks later.
("Rifkin's Festival" will open in theaters and on-demand on January 28.)
(In light of Sidney Poiter's recent passing, we are re-running this article by Eve Goldberg that was originally posted in May, 2021.)
BY EVE GOLDBERG
To Sir, With Love
(1967) is a classroom drama set in London’s working-class East End during the
swinging 1960s.It’s a well-scripted, well-acted,
and well-directed film of the “good teacher vs unruly students†subgenre.But, more than anything else, To Sir, With
Love is a Sidney Poitier film.It’s
Poitier’s persona and charisma, his decency and humanity, that shine through in
every scene.And, it’s Poitier at the
apex of his acting career—In the Heat of the Night and Guess Who’s
Coming to Dinner were also released that same year.The film has aged surprisingly well, and is
still enjoyable to watch.But it’s as an
artifact of the Sidney Poitier oeuvre that To Sir, With Love earns its historical
significance.
Class Struggle
In To Sir, With Love,
Poitier plays Mark Thackeray, an unemployed engineer who takes a job teaching in
a rough London high school while looking for work in his chosen field.From the beginning, the students give him a
hard time.Led by rebellious Bert Denham
(Christian Roberts), the teens are disrespectful and rude.Despite Thackeray’s patience, he fails to
reach them.Eventually, he ditches the
academic curricula and decides to engage the students around issues of personal
ethics, survival skills, and everyday reality. “Life, love, death, sex, marriage, rebellion—anything
you want,†he tells them.Thackeray
opens up about his own hard-scrabble childhood in British Guiana.He demands that the students treat him, and
each other, with respect.At one point,
he takes them on a field trip to a museum, which proves to be a breakthrough
scene as they experience life, and themselves, in a new way.
As the students grow and
change, new challenges emerge for Thackeray: a female student (pretty blonde Pamela,
played by Judy Geeson) develops a crush on him; he guides another student to
cope with a humiliating situation in a more mature way. Towards the end of the movie, the students
surprise Thackeray when they overcome their racism to attend the funeral of a
mixed-race classmate’s mother.
In Poitier’s own words, his
character “taught manners to kids who hadn’t understood what manners were… He
also taught about self-respect, dignity, integrity, and honesty… He taught them
integrity largely by showing them integrity.He offered himself as a friend, and until they were able to understand
the offer and accept it, he endured an awful lot.He was driven to anger.He was humiliated… In the end, though, he
succeeded in helping his students to see themselves in this new life as
valuable, useful human beings with impressive potential.â€
At the conclusion of the film,
Thackeray receives the engineering job offer he was hoping for.But he tears up the job offer letter,
realizing that he has found his calling as a teacher.
Race Takes a Back Seat
Despite several nods to issues
of racial prejudice—in addition to the funeral subplot, Thackeray must deal
with sporadic racists comments made by a fellow teacher and by the students—To
Sir, With Love is more about class than race.Thackeray is educated, sophisticated, of the
professional class and upwardly mobile.His students—almost all of them are white—are hard-core working-class,
aware that they face a bleak economic future.When Thackeray throws out the text books in favor of teaching practical life
lessons, he is in fact choosing to instruct the students in middle-class values
and behavior.
But for all that class
trumps race in this film, there is not a single moment when an American viewer
in 1967 would not have been acutely aware that this is a black man teaching
white kids.This is a black man counseling
a student to disavow violence and turn the other cheek.This is a black man who might or might not
become romantically involved with a white teacher.This is a black man who is intelligent, resourceful,
self-restrained, and kind.
And that was a big part of
the movie’s draw.
“I’m the only oneâ€
In 1967, Sidney Poitier was
the only black movie star in America.There
was no Will Smith.There was no Denzel
Washington.There was no Halle Berry, no
Eddie Murphy, no Viola Davis, no Jamie Foxx, no Angela Bassett.
In 1967, movies were still at
the center of the American cultural universe.When Newark and Detroit erupted in riots, when issues of race were daily
front page news, when the more radical factions of the civil rights movement were
verbally duking it out with the more moderate groups, Poitier was under
pressure to be a spokesperson for all of black America.
“I’m the only one,†Poitier
stated in an interview from that time.“I’m the only Negro actor who works with any degree of regularity.I represent 10,000,000 people in this
country, and millions more in Africa.â€
With the release of To
Sir, With Love, In the Heat of the Night, and Guess Who’s Coming
to Dinner, he also became the top-grossing box office star in the country.His ascent to this rarefied position was a
matter of talent, hard work, and the guts to take on challenges and risks.
Sidney Poitier’s life
journey began in 1927.He grew up on Cat
Island in the Bahamas, population 1,000.His parents were tomato farmers; their house had no electricity or
running water.He saw his first
automobile at age 10 when the family moved to Nassau.When he was 15, Poitier went to live with his
older brother in Miami.A year later, he
moved to New York where he worked as a dishwasher, took acting lessons, and
joined the American Negro Theater.A
fellow restaurant worker helped him improve his reading skills by pouring over
the daily newspaper together.
Eventually, the actor began
to get parts in theater, film, and television.His breakout movie role came in 1955 when he was cast as an angry,
rebellious student in Blackboard Jungle. From there, he went on to leading roles in The
Defiant Ones, A Raisin in the Sun, Lilies of the Field, and A
Patch of Blue.He was the first
black person to win a Best Actor Oscar—for his role in 1963’s Lilies of the
Field.
Poitier’s star was rising at
the exact time the civil rights movement was making its enormous impact on mainstream
America.He became active in the movement,
traveling to the south for Freedom Summer, and participating in Martin Luther
King, Jr.’s 1964 March on Washington.(Other stars who attended the march included Marlon Brando, Charlton
Heston, Paul Newman, and Burt Lancaster.)
As
an actor, Poitier became an icon in the struggle for racial equality.He refused to play roles that did not embody
dignity and strength. In an interview,
he described his relationship to the history of black people in cinema: “The kind of Negro played on the screen was
always negative, buffoons, clowns, shuffling butlers, really misfits.… I chose
not to be a party to the stereotyping … I want people to feel when they leave
the theatre that life and human beings are worthwhile. That is my only
philosophy about the pictures I do.â€
Fortunately
for Poitier, he was not the only one in Hollywood concerned with breaking these
old stereotypes.“The explanation for my
career,†he writes in his memoir, “was that I was instrumental for those few
filmmakers who had a social conscience.Men like Daryl Zanuck, Joe Mankiewicz, Stanley Kramer, the Mirisch
brothers, Ralph Nelson, Mike Frankovich, David Susskind—men who, in their
careers, felt called to address some of the issues of their day.â€
In 1966, Poitier was cast as
Virgil Tibbs, a Philadelphia police detective investigating a murder in a small
southern town, in Norman Jewison’s In The Heat of the Night.While waiting for production to begin, he traveled
to London to star in a modestly-budgeted film about a teacher and his students,
based on a property that had been kicking around Hollywood for years.
Iconic
To Sir, With Love
began as a 1959 autobiographical novel by Guyanese writer E.R. Braithwaite.Columbia Studios owned the film rights but
executives worried that it wouldn’t be a money-maker.They fretted that both its London setting and
its interracial romance between Thackeray and a white teacher would alienate
American audiences.So the book just
sat.
Eventually however,
Poitier’s agent Marty Baum put together a deal that offset the studio’s
concerns.
Baum was also the agent of writer
James Clavell (of later Shogun fame) who had scored a big success with his
book and movie King Rat.Clavell had
done a bit of screenwriting and directing and was eager to do more.He signed on as writer-director of To Sir,
With Love.Baum structured a deal in
which Poitier would get only a small up-front salary—much less than he would
normally command—plus 10% of the film’s gross earnings. Clavell agreed to work for a percentage of the
net.The film’s total budget would be
$640,000.By way of comparison, the
budget for In the Heat of the Night was $2,000,000 and Guess Who’s
Coming to Dinner’s budget was $4,000,000. Taking on only a minimal financial risk,
Columbia greenlit the film.
To Sir, With Love was
shot on location in London and at England’s Pinewood Studios.It was released in June, 1967, and quickly
became a smash hit. Studio executives
were surprised: they didn’t know that Poitier was such a huge box office draw.
Teenagers (including 13-year-old
yours truly) were among those who flocked to the movie.It had rebellious youth; it had Mod clothing,
rock music, and pop star Lulu’s catchy hit “To Sir, With Love.â€(Nineteen-year-old Lulu also has a part as
one of the students.) The title song
plays three times in the film, most notably as the soundtrack for an unusual scene
that sticks out in an otherwise conventionally styled move: The class field
trip to the museum is presented as a montage of still photos set to the title
tune (a slightly longer version than was heard on the radio or on the 45 RPM
record.)Is the montage a nod to hip,
avant garde filmmaking such as A Hard Days’ Night?Or was it a necessity due to the film’s
limited budget?Either way, it works.
Another plus for teenage
audiences is the school’s end-of-the-year dance at which live entertainment is
provided by real-life British rock band The Mindbenders.
But most of all, the movie
had Sidney Poitier.Who wouldn’t want a
teacher as handsome, understanding, compassionate, and smart as Mr. Thackeray?
Spurred by Lulu's bestselling single of the title song, the film's soundtrack became a hit, as well. It featured an extended cut of the song heard over the museum montage sequence.
Reviews of the movie were
mixed.
The New York Times’
Bosley Crowther called it, “a cozy, good-humored and unbelievable little tale
of a teacher getting acquainted with his pupils, implying but never stating
that it is nice for the races to live congenially together.â€
“If the hero of this
Pollyanna story were white, his pieties would have been whistled off the
screen,†Penelope Gilliatt wrote in The New Yorker.
Pauline Kael in The New
Republic—she had not moved to The New Yorker yet—was sympathetic to the
double bind Poitier found himself in: “Poitier has been playing the
ideal-boy-next-door-who-happens-to-be-black for so long that he’s always the
same…[but] What can he do?He can’t pass
as a white man in order to play rats or cowards or sons of bitches, and if he
plays Negro rats or cowards or sons of bitches he’ll be attacked for doing
Negroes harm.â€
The black press, which
generally applauded Poitier and his pioneering contributions to civil rights,
was mostly enthusiastic about To Sir, With Love.It was noted in Ebony, however, that
the book’s interracial romance between Thackeray and fellow teacher Gillian
Blanchard (Suzy Kendall) had been deleted in the movie.“Had Thackeray been white, the
Thackeray-Gillian relationship would have been a love affair.â€
Despite these mixed reviews,
the public kept buying tickets.Loads of
them.Month after month.Soon, To Sir, With Love became
Columbia’s biggest hit since Lawrence of Arabia.
Eclipsed
In the Heat of the Night
opened just two months after To Sir, With Love.Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner opened
several months after that.These latter
two films were prestige projects, centered around issues of race, with multiple
Academy Awards nominations and wins.All
three movies were giant box office hits.By any measure in Hollywood, 1967 had shaped up as The Year of Sidney
Poitier.
However, the peak of his
acting career was short-lived.Social
and political currents were shifting, and the tide turned amazingly quickly against
his film persona.
According to the actor, “The
issue boiled down to why I wasn’t more angry and confrontational.New voices were speaking for
African-Americans, and in new ways.Stokely Carmichael, H. Rap Brown, the Black Panthers.According to a certain taste that was coming
into ascendancy at the time, I was an ‘Uncle Tom,’ even a ‘house Negro,’ for
playing roles that were nonthreatening to white audiences, for playing the ‘noble
Negro’ who fulfills white liberal fantasies.In essence, I was being taken to tasks for playing exemplary human
beings.â€
Already in 1967, Poitier
sensed that his career as a leading man on screen was coming to an end.And he was right.He made more movies, as an actor and director—he
directed Uptown Saturday Night and Stir Crazy among others—but the
height of his cultural influence was over.
Today, Sidney Poitier may be
most remembered for his role as detective Virgil Tibbs in In The Heat of the
Night.But let’s not forget that it
was a little movie about a teacher and his students that launched the great
actor’s star into the stratosphere.