Quote of the Day (Fran Lebowitz, on Her Urban Instincts)

“To put it bluntly, I am not the type of person who wants to go back to the land; I am the person of person who wants to go back to the hotel.”—American humorist and actor Fran Lebowitz, Social Studies (1981)

With Nora Ephron gone, the closest thing our time may have to the wit Dorothy Parker might be Fran Lebowitz—and, like Parker, though Lebowitz made her reputation in New York, she was born across the Hudson River—in Morristown, NJ, 75 years ago today, to be exact.

Unlike Parker or Ephron, Ms. Lebowitz has not gone to Hollywood as a screenwriter. In fact, she’s not written anything remotely substantial since the 1990s.

Still, she would dispute any notion that the phrase “writer's block” applies to her, though not for the reason you may think: 

“I would not call it a writer's block,” she has said. “A writer's block to me is a temporary thing. A month, you know, six weeks. This was more a writer's blockade.”

Until she breaks this "blockade," fans will have to make do with the two essay collections Lebowitz published 40 to 50 years ago, Metropolitan Life and Social Studies; view Martin Scorsese’s documentary about her from four years ago, Pretend It’s A City; and watch out for occasional interviews over the years in which she engages in hilarious venting and kvetching with all manner of opinions.

Quote of the Day (Martin Scorsese, on Family Moviegoing Experiences in the Early Postwar Era)

“I realize now that the warmth of that connection with my family and with the images on the screen gave me something very precious. We were experiencing something fundamental together. We were living through the emotional truths on the screen, often in coded form, which these films from the 1940s and 1950s sometimes expressed in small things: gestures, glances, reactions between the characters, light, shadow. These were things that we normally couldn’t discuss or wouldn’t discuss or even acknowledge in our lives.”—American Oscar-winning director Martin Scorsese, “The Persisting Vision: Reading the Language of Cinema,” The New York Review of Books, Aug. 15, 2015

The image accompanying this post, of Martin Scorsese at the 2023 Montclair Film Festival, was taken Oct. 27, 2023, by Neil Grabowsky.

This Day in Film History (Scorsese’s ‘Age of Innocence’ Harks Back to Golden Age of Period Drama)

Sept. 17, 1993— The Age of Innocence, an adaptation of the 1920 Pulitzer Prize-winning novel by Edith Wharton, opened to general release in New York, on its way to disappointment both at the box office and at the Academy Awards.

But in the three decades since, this piercing examination of conscience and conformity versus the promise of freedom and self-fulfillment has become celebrated as an example of bravura cinema, as well as representing a high point in the careers of its three principal actors: Daniel Day-Lewis, Michelle Pfeiffer, and Winona Ryder.

The 30^th anniversary of this plush period drama coincides with the release this fall of Killers of the Flower Moon, the latest entry in the half-century career of Innocence director Martin Scorsese, as well as Season 2 of The Gilded Age, the HBO series that occurs in the “Old New York” milieu that Wharton chronicled with such irony and insight.

All of this provides an opportunity to examine how The Age of Innocence relates to and departs from Scorsese’s larger work; why its initial reception fell short of expectations; and why it nevertheless repays repeated viewings.

Underappreciated at the time

Coming off the acclaimed Goodfellas, Scorsese had now turned to the costume drama genre that had long interested him. Friend Jay Cocks had been urging Scorsese to see this as next project for nearly a decade, but it was only after the controversy over the alleged “blasphemy” of The Last Temptation of Christ had died down that the director decided to collaborate with Cocks on the script.

But the choice puzzled and mystified fans that were awaiting another in his line of urban dramas often laced with violence and profanity, dating back to Mean Streets and Taxi Driver in the Seventies. (They would have to wait another two years to get what they wanted: Casino.)

The reception might have been different if, as planned, the movie had debuted in the fall of 1992, when its principal competition at the Academy Awards would have been Clint Eastwood’s Unforgiven.

But it was held back by over a year to allow Scorsese more time to edit, so that what would have been prestige Oscar bait would now enter awards season facing Steven Spielberg’s Holocaust drama Schindler’s List.

In an interview for a Criterion Collection DVD from2018, Scorsese said that Vincent Canby’s negative review in The New York Times “killed” The Age of Innocence. That is probably overstating matters.

Variety reviewer Todd McCarthy was closer to the mark in predicting, “For sophisticated viewers with a taste for literary adaptations and visits to the past, there is a great deal here to savor…But it is difficult to picture general audiences warming up to these representatives of the old ruling class.”

Even the opening scene brings audiences face to face with this situation: a sequence from Gounod’s opera Faust that segues into a sweeping reaction shot of the audience.

It sets up that the upper-crust spectators are less interested in the onstage spectacle than the drama in the seats: the presence of Countess Ellen Olenska, a scandal-shadowed member of the socially prominent Mingott family. It also foreshadows the doomed relationship that will eventually develop between Ellen and lawyer Newland Archer.

Yet casual viewers, unfamiliar with the Faust source material, are unlikely to grasp the symbolism. Moreover, as the scene lingers for a couple of minutes without subtitles, it tests viewer attention and patience from the start.

Moreover, Wharton’s characters speak in code—approaching sensitive subjects but using silences and facial expressions fill in the gaps left by words they dare not utter.

The similarities between Gilded Age aristocrats and Mafia gangsters

Viewers taking in this atmosphere of physical opulence and verbal repression, then, are likely to be astonished by Scorsese’s claim that this was “the most violent film I ever made.” What could he possibly mean by this?

The best answer might come in one of the film’s best-remembered set pieces: a dinner at which Archer, moving toward breaking away from his affectionate but passionless marriage to the judgmental, unimaginative conformist May, finds his path blocked by the entire mass of aristocratic New York.

Like Goodfellas’ Tommy DeVito finding too late that his initiation as a Mafia “made man” will not in fact transpire, Archer discovers a cadre that will punish him for defying its code, with the camera sweeping past the guests and their sumptuous even as narrator Joanne Woodward intones Wharton’s words:

Archer, who seemed to be assisting at the scene in a state of odd imponderability, as if he floated somewhere between chandelier and ceiling, wondered at nothing so much as his own share in the proceedings. As his glance travelled from one placid well-fed face to another he saw all the harmless-looking people engaged upon May's canvas-backs as a band of dumb conspirators, and himself and the pale woman on his right as the centre of their conspiracy. And then it came over him, in a vast flash made up of many broken gleams, that to all of them he and Madame Olenska were lovers, lovers in the extreme sense peculiar to "foreign" vocabularies. He guessed himself to have been, for months, the centre of countless silently observing eyes and patiently listening ears, he understood that, by means as yet unknown to him, the separation between himself and the partner of his guilt had been achieved, and that now the whole tribe had rallied about his wife on the tacit assumption that nobody knew anything, or had ever imagined anything, and that the occasion of the entertainment was simply May Archer's natural desire to take an affectionate leave of her friend and cousin.

The images, in combination with the foregoing description, eliminate the need to include onscreen this Wharton passage that may have capped the resemblance between the genteel aristocrats and the crude gangsters of Goodfellas:

It was the old New York way of taking life "without effusion of blood": the way of people who dreaded scandal more than disease, who placed decency above courage, and who considered that nothing was more ill-bred than "scenes," except the behaviour of those who gave rise to them.

A cinematic feast

This dinner scene is an example of how Scorsese sought visual and aural counterparts to Wharton’s verbal splendor. The aural component was supplied by Woodward’s voiceover narration and a memorable, Brahms-influenced soundtrack by Elmer Bernstein, while the visuals came through Gabriella Pescucci’s Oscar-winning costume design and Dante Ferretti’s production design.

In focusing on the themes of money and marriage in Victorian Age, Scorsese had one obvious antecedent: William Wyler’s The Heiress. In a February 1994 interview with Ian Christie of Sight and Sound Magazine, Scorsese acknowledged that the 1949 adaptation of the Broadway play of the same name and its source material, Henry James’ Washington Square, “made a strong impression on me as a child.”

Yet, though he admitted that it still “holds up well,” he criticized it for being “theatrical,” with a “three-act” structure—and “no narration, no montages, no flashbacks or flashes forward and no visual interpolations such as letters”—all devices he employed in The Age of Innocence.

These were not the only methods that helped make this one of Scorsese’s most controlled movies: Vibrant colors, dissolves, transitions, and similar visual motifs echo and reinforce each other, or subtly reinforce characterizations:

*Fireplace scenes building slowly in intensity parallel the growing emotional intimacy of Archer and Ellen;

*Archer bangs a pen violently at one point to force the ink out—encapsulating his frustration with bottled-up social norms;

*Demure young May is dressed early on in virginal white, while her more unconventional, passionate older cousin Ellen is dressed in red;

*And one scene that Scorsese made sure to carry over from the book depicted May as skilled at archery—a sly representation of how she will hit her target, Archer himself.

Unlike The Gilded Age, which in its first season leaned heavily on New York stage actors, Scorsese relied heavily on British actors.

Scorsese and Cocks have explained that such casting made sense, as New York aristocrats of the Victorian Era still retained strong verbal influences from their English ancestors. I think the choice also might derive from a belief that British actors came with appreciation for texts and a verbal dexterity springing from their intensive stage training.

Even so, to be fair, it’s hard to argue with what Lewis, Richard E. Grant, Alec McCowen, Michael Gough, Geraldine Chaplin, Stuart Wilson, Siân Phillips, and Miriam Margolyes did with their dialogue.

I think that The Age of Innocence is one of Scorsese’s overlooked masterpieces. Far more than most movies, it yields new insights each time viewed to go with scenes that will never fade from the memory.

Only the third time around, for instance, did I notice that a portrait of a woman bearing a striking resemblance to Woodward hangs on the wall in one scene. And only on this latest viewing did I pick up on how the camera, having focused for several minutes on the dogs climbing over Miriam Margolyes as Mrs. Mingott, mocks her further by moving towards other objects in the room: paintings, drawings, and sculptures featuring even more dogs.

At the same time, fans like me recall how Archer’s unbuttoning of Ellen’s glove in a horsedrawn carriage leads to a passionate encounter, or how the nimbus of light in which he beholds Ellen from a distance as he waits for a sailboat to pass a lighthouse at sunset.

Enhancing appreciation of Wharton

I am also grateful that Scorsese’s adaptation has fostered renewed appreciation of Wharton, one of my favorite writers, after an extended period of popular neglect.

In the 1920s and 1930s she had enjoyed significant attention, not only in sales but also in royalties from theatrical and cinematic adaptations. The Age of Innocence itself became a 1928 Broadway vehicle for Katherine Cornell, as well as a 1924 silent film (now lost) and a 1934 talkie starring John Boles as Archer, Julia Haydon as May and the incomparable Irene Dunne as Ellen.

Given the reverence accorded Scorsese and his greater faithfulness to the source material (approximately an hour longer than the Dunne version), this adaptation was not only more high-profile than these earlier efforts, but more successful than Hollywood’s other attempts to explore Wharton in the 1990s.

The Children (1990), with Kim Novak and Ben Kingsley, took on one of the novelist’s bestselling but less critically acclaimed works of the 1920s, and Ethan Frome (1993) featured Liam Neeson and Patricia Arquette in Wharton’s tale of thwarted romance in the Berkshires. The decade closed with Gillian Anderson movingly depicting doomed Gilded Age beauty Lily Bart in The House of Mirth (2000).

In November, Apple TV+ will begin a series based on Wharton’s The Buccaneers, a novel completed several decades after her death in 1937 by Marion Mainwaring. Although Sofia Coppola’s attempt to develop another Wharton novel, The Custom of the Country, has temporarily hit a roadblock, there is always the hope that this biting satire will also find its audience.

Nevertheless, it would be difficult for any of these past, present, or future adaptations to match the art, depth of feeling, and appreciation for the source material shown by Scorsese’s Age of Innocence.

Video of the Day: Van Morrison, ‘Caravan’ Live, From ‘The Last Waltz’

In The Last Waltz, the 1976 documentary of the farewell performance of The Band, director Martin Scorsese was able to cull footage from a host of star performers paying tribute to and playing with the group—including Bob Dylan, Eric Clapton, Neil Young, and Joni Mitchell. But none, I would argue, could compete with Van Morrison for sheer kinetic power.

For all Caravan’s innate brilliance, apparent in the studio version on Moondance LP, I was simply unprepared for Morrison's exuberance in concert, the way he jumped, pumped and led the audience on with, “One more time,” again and again and again. You can see it on the faces of Robbie Robertson and the other members of The Band that, on this night of nights, this was something special.

This YouTube clip is, quite simply, enough to make you not just want to “hear the merry gypsies play,” but to join them.

This Day in Boxing History (Sugar Ray, LaMotta in “St. Valentine’s Day Massacre’)

Feb. 14, 1951—“I fought Sugar Ray Robinson so many times, it's a wonder I don't have diabetes,” Jake LaMotta has marveled in old age. In their sixth and final bout, Robinson pummeled LaMotta, a tough adversary who had closely contested their prior matches, winning on a technical knockout (TKO) in the 13^th round to take the middleweight crown from the "Bronx Bull."

This was their first fight with a title at stake. Robinson was the reigning welterweight king, and LaMotta had been the middleweight champ for the last year and a half. With so much on the line, each fighter gave it everything he had, with Robinson, recently acclaimed “the greatest all-around fighter pound-for-pound in any division” by sportswriter Nat Fleischer, dishing it out and LaMotta, to an extent that even surprised longtime observers of his style, taking it.

The bloodletting, combined with the Chicago locale, quickly led boxing fans to label this the sport’s “St. Valentine’s Day Massacre.” 

The denouement of the fight became the subject of one of the most memorable scenes of Martin Scorsese’s 1980 film classic, Raging Bull. When the referee mercifully stops the match, Robert DeNiro’s LaMotta stands bloody but unbowed in the ring, staggering over to Ray Barnes’ Robinson and saying, “You never got me down, Ray.”

When one thinks of the great boxing rivals, Robinson and LaMotta rank with Tunney and Dempsey or Ali and Frazier. The post-career relationship, however, resembled more of the mutual respect between Tunney and Dempsey than the animosity between Ali and Frazier. “Sugar Ray was the greatest fighter who ever lived,” LaMotta recalled in a January 2013 Esquire interview. After their September 1945 bout, a split decision for Robinson, the winner from Harlem acknowledged about his rival, “LaMotta is the toughest man I’ve ever fought. I’ve fought him five times and hit him with everything I know how to throw, but he still stands up.”

It was not really an ability to take a punch that aided LaMotta, however, but rather the instinct to avoid the worst of the blow. “Lot of guys can take punches,” LaMotta told Esquire. “The idea is not to take unnecessary punishment. I explain taking a punch this way: In baseball, when someone throws a hardball at you and you don't have a glove, if you want to catch it, your palm moves back with the ball at the last second. That slight movement saves you from taking a hard blow. If you move the same way when a fist comes at you, it takes away more than 50 percent of the power. The secret is to move with the punch.”

LaMotta dealt Robinson the first loss of his career, after 40 fights, in a unanimous decision in their second encounter, in February 1943. But in that earlier match, Robinson, a natural welterweight, was outweighed by 16 pounds by LaMotta. Eight years later, LaMotta was only five pounds heavier. More crucially, he had slowed down in the last six years, making him an easier target for Robinson—and, after eight rounds that were pretty even, that latter disadvantage would prove decisive. 

The four-minute Raging Bull scene I mentioned above captures the atmosphere of the bout’s last stage: the blood that splattered onlookers, the horrified fascination of a larger audience (it was the first and only one of their bouts ever aired on television), and the manner in which time held momentarily still for LaMotta as he awaited the final onslaught from Robinson. 

Just how much he endured might best be described by sportswriter Red Smith:

In the third minute of the 13th round Ray Robinson hit Jake LaMotta for-what was it? – the thousandth time? The five thousandth? Jake was hung on the ropes like a picture on the wall, like an old, wrinkled suit in the attic closet. Now he came off the hook, sagged forward, bent double at the waist. He embraced Robinson about the drawers and the referee, Frank Sikora, pushed in between them and motioned to Robinson to desist. The greatest fist fighter in the world was middleweight champion of the world, and one of the toughest had suffered the first believable knockout of his life.

LaMotta, Smith practically gasped, had been “slugged, tortured, flayed, bloodied and bludgeoned… stripped of his title and nearly detached from his intellect as well.” What was surely on the mind of Smith and other observers was Robinson’s successful defense of his welterweight crown in 1947 against Jimmy Doyle. The latter, who had defied doctors’ orders not to fight again after being knocked unconscious for 15 minutes in a prior bout, ended up going to the hospital again, where he died the afternoon after his eight-round loss to Robinson.

Perhaps what has allowed LaMotta to live into his 90s was not just his ability to “move with the punch,” but also the sense of when to get out. He lasted another three years and 10 bouts (including four losses) before deciding to leave the ring. Robinson, two months older, did not stop until 1965, 24 years after he began. (He needed the money badly: he had not been attentive to the side businesses he had started, and in the mid-1950s the Internal Revenue Service came after him, even garnishing some of his earnings.)

That almost certainly was a mistake. In 1989, he died of what was diagnosed at the time as Alzheimer’s Disease. More recently, however, his case has given rise to speculation that he might have fallen victim to chronic traumatic encephalopathy (CTE), the brain disease that has come into the news because of its impact on football players.

Robinson and LaMotta had the mental toughness that made them champions. Unfortunately, they could not control outside the ring the aggression that brought them to the top of their profession. Raging Bull detailed in unmistakable and unflattering terms the domestic violence that LaMotta inflicted on his beautiful second wife Vikki, and his younger brother and manager Joey. (After seeing the movie, the boxer asked Vikki if he had really been that bad. "Even worse," she replied.)

It was less well known that Robinson did the same against his beautiful second wife, Edna Mae, when she discovered his flagrant infidelity. The African-American sportswriter Sam Lacy expressed his dismay about this behavior this way:  “I have said many times that Sugar Ray Robinson was the greatest athlete in a given field I have had the pleasure of observing. I have also said many times that he can be one of the most disgusting figures one is compelled to meet in his business.”