|
A parlor trick, but the kind—an inquisitive jester making his way through the ghosts of cinema's past—that gets Godard at the Moviola to put Histoire(s) together. Film noir provides the found footage, Steve Martin's shamus cavorts through it as classic scenes are Kuleshov-stitched to a mock-potboiler about Nazi spies and kidnapped cheesemakers. Rachel Ward is the sultry client, Philip Marlowe himself (Humphrey Bogart, out of The Big Sleep, Dark Passage and In a Lonely Place) is the assistant. The hero rummages through an office looking for clues and in walks Alan Ladd's This Gun for Hire hitman, later there's booze money for Ray Milland in The Lost Weekend and a bottomless pan of java for Burt Lancaster in The Killers. He gets Ingrid Bergman (Notorious) to smile by puckering up and barking, then strangles Bette Davis (Deception). Since Barbara Stanwyck had already turned up in a clip from Sorry, Wrong Number, Martin dons the Double Indemnity wig and is pounced on by Fred MacMurray. For this editing experiment, Carl Reiner gets Michael Chapman's cinematography to approximate the genre's smoke and shadows, and avails himself of Edith Head's pinstriped suits and Miklós Rózsa's strings. Martin's anti-femme fatale lament deserves to be quoted in full: "They reach down your throat and grab your heart, pull it out and throw it on the floor, step on it with their high heels, spit on it, shove it in the oven and cook the shit out of it. Then they slice it into little pieces, slam it on a hunk of toast, and serve it to you and expect you to say, 'Thanks, honey. It was delicious'." The denouement brings Reiner's Preminger impression and Reni Santoni's rendition of Pedro Armendáriz and, since it's the Eighties, promises a sequel with nudity. In black and white.
--- Fernando F. Croce |