Late Fame (USA/France 2025: Dir Kent Lee)

Willem Dafoe, an actor who often relishes big parts in smaller films these days, is Ed Saxberger, a poet whose heyday was 1979, although it's strongly suggested that he was a man out of time even in those days (a blast of the eponymous song by no wave artists 'Mars', dating from more or less the same year, plays as we meet him).

Like many before and after him, Saxberger was unable to sustain a living as a writer and ended up, ironically, working for the postal service, living quietly in a small New York apartment and busily ignoring calls from his sister to come and visit his dying brother.

Returning home one day, Ed gets a visitor; an initially shy, preppy guy from his neighbourhood named Wilson Meyers (Edmund Donovan), who has recognised Saxberger as the poet from 1970s New York whose volume of poems, entitled 'Way Past Go' and long out of print, once wowed the city.

Meyers fan boys the poet and begs him to meet his friends, a group of very well off New Yorkers keen to rekindle the poetic muse in a place that has long outgrown the beatnik generation, who name themselves 'The Enthusiasm Society', which Saxberger describes as "Victorian". Once under the spell of the group, who deify Saxberger and feel that the world should once more know about him, he's seduced into accepting an offer to write some new work for a poetry 'happening' they're organising. He also meets Gloria (Greta Lee), a vampy singer/actress to whom he's instantly attracted and who seems to like him more for what he represents - a link to a bygone age - than as a person.

But the shine quickly rubs off 'The Enthusiasm Society', whose desire to bring culture back to New York seems like one more thing for bored rich kids to amuse themselves with, and Saxberger is gradually sidelined. In their local coffee shop the group's arch enemies are another similarly entitled bunch, a phone addicted collective called 'the influencers', but after a while it's difficult to differentiate between the two similarly attention seeking parties.

"There's no fool like an old fool" is the saying, and Saxberger's brief rise and fall on the back of Meyer and his gang is painful to watch; it may be my slightly advanced years, but I found nothing here to suggest a comedy. Whatever muse visited the poet in his heyday seems to have long departed, but when it comes to talent the rest of 'The Enthusiasm Society' seem happy - although this is a relative word - to recite other dead poets; the whole idea of the group's event feels increasingly thin and borderline narcissistic.

There are some great elements here, notably Dafoe's Saxberger, whose lined face registers every emotion as, plucked from obscurity, he battles with the aims of the society while losing his heart (which one suspects has been closed off for a long time) to Gloria, clearly a woman with her own demons. Lee is similarly impressive as the many faceted, glamorous but damaged actress (a role destined for Sandra Hüller until a scheduling problem intervened, possibly for the best). Unfortunately the rest of the cast seem a little one dimensional; more importantly where the script should fizz it too often just simmers on a low heat (apologies for mixing the culinary metaphors). I also just didn't get the sense of then and now New York; through Saxberger's eyes his city has changed out of all recognition, but we see too little of it (a problem which also beset Marielle Heller's 2018 film Can You Ever Forgive Me? with which this movie shares some thematic elements) and we have to rely on the poet's own voice which, strangely because of his original calling, is rather monosyllabic. I couldn't help but be a little disappointed with Late Fame; it has a great setup but fizzles out, and needed a lot more pep.

Dark Eyes Retrovision #8 - Breakfast at Tiffany's (USA 1961: Dir Blake Edwards)

Notes from my introduction to the film at Screen 25 on 15 February 2019.

It’s 5am on a Sunday morning, October 2nd 1960. A cab pulls up at the deserted junction of 5th Avenue and 57th Street in Manhattan, disgorging a woman, dressed in a black Givenchy evening dress and wearing huge sunglasses, who totters up to the window display of the famous Tiffany’s jewellery store and gazes on its contents while drinking coffee and eating a Danish pastry. This was scene one on the first day of shooting Breakfast at Tiffany’s and it’s arguably one of cinema’s most iconic openings.

On that first day it was reported that the star, Audrey Hepburn, was incredibly nervous, as evidenced by a pile of stubbed out cigarettes seen on set, her state of mind not helped by arriving in Manhattan fresh from her very quiet mountaintop home in Switzerland, where she had lived since 1953 with her bullying husband, Mel Ferrer, called “the frog faced delinquent with the spindly legs,” by Audrey’s mother, with whom no love was lost. Audrey had also recently become a mother herself; the separation from her 10-month-old son, coupled with Ferrer’s feelings that his wife should be a mother first and an actress second, made her anxieties on this first day of shooting quite understandable.

Most people will know that Breakfast at Tiffany’s is based on the novella by Truman Capote, published in 1958, and that the inspiration for its subject, Holly Golightly, was as much his mother as it was a conflation of a number of society figures who flocked round the author at parties and openings. Each one of Capote’s ‘swans,’ as the women were later referred to, thought that Ms Golightly was modelled on her, and to some extent they were all right.

In casting Holly Golightly Capote - who subsequently took a deal that would remove him from any further influence in the adaptation - wanted Marilyn Monroe to play the part, which would of course have put a very different slant on the movie. The story goes that it was the fear of budget and shooting overruns that affected the decision not to cast her (Marilyn had a reputation for lateness and an inherent difficulty in remembering her lines), but it may also have been because of the spectre of the Motion Picture Association’s dreaded Production Code. This was, after all, an adaptation of a story about a prostitute, a woman who clearly slept with men for money, or to use Capote’s words, an ‘American geisha.’ The movie’s producers, Martin Jurow and Richard Shepherd were therefore on the lookout to cast someone who, while still playing an ‘escort,’ could inject a level of innocence to counteract the more risqué elements of the story.

Audrey Hepburn was about as far away from Marilyn Monroe as you could get. She was actually 31 at the start of filming – playing a character who in the novella was around 18 or 19. Since being ‘discovered’ 10 years previously – by the author Colette of all people, who chose her for the lead role in the stage play of Gigi - over the next ten years Hepburn’s star inexorably ascended. She was the right face at the right time, the fifties being the decade when ‘teenagers’ started to be a thing. Up until then the screen role models for girls had either been someone like Doris Day or, at the other end of the scale, Monroe. Hepburn was someone that female cinema-goers of all ages could relate to, someone independent yet stylish, but down to earth.

But when the producers approached Hepburn for Tiffany’s she was very unsure, both about the character she’d be playing, and the range of acting required; previous roles in Roman Holiday, Sabrina and Funny Face hadn’t exactly stretched her repertoire, and the script for Breakfast at Tiffany’s required her to laugh, cry and sing!

Holly Golightly (Audrey Hepburn) in the opening scene of
Breakfast at Tiffany's

An understandably twitchy Hepburn made it a condition for accepting the role that some of the dialogue was watered down – it was Hepburn’s idea, for example, to change the lines about being paid fifty dollars for services rendered in the ladies room to the more innocuous ‘powder room’ – and the normally stubborn screenwriter George Axelrod happily obliged these changes to keep their star sweet.

Hepburn’s influence also came to bear in the choice of director. John Frankenheimer was first mentioned but she vetoed that. Many other names entered the frame - and exited quickly - until George Shepherd suggested Blake Edwards who had, up until that moment, mostly directed TV and frothy comedies; his last movie had been High Times, featuring a 57-year-old Bing Crosby dancing in a pink skirt. Although he was an outside choice he had successfully directed a big star in a movie – Cary Grant in Operation Petticoat - which gave the producers, who thought that Hepburn would require some solid direction, the confidence that he was the man for the job.

Edwards also brought on board his go to composer Henry Mancini, whose increasing move away from classic film orchestration to more jazzy themes was perfect for the film – the score is one of Tiffany’s strongest elements. Blake also cast his mate Mickey Rooney in the part of Mr Yunioshi, but the less said about that the better – if you’ve seen the film you’ll know exactly what I mean, if you haven’t then I’ll apologise now.

Reflecting later on in her career, Hepburn concluded that Breakfast at Tiffany’s was the best thing she’d ever done because it was the hardest. But she couldn’t have predicted how prescient her performance was. When we look back now we can see that Breakfast at Tiffany’s acts as a kind of shorthand for what was happening in New York at the time, and particularly for females. It’s one of the first Hollywood films to show a strong, independent woman successful at what she’s doing and - mostly - in charge of herself. Around the time the film was released, Joan Didion neatly summarised Golightly’s character when she wrote that New York City had become the natural home for “girls who want to prolong the period when they can experiment, mess around, make mistakes. In New York there is no gentle pressure for them to marry.” Change was definitely in the air.

You can access the full programme at Screen 25 and find out about ticket options here.

Devoured (US 2012: Dir Greg Olliver)

There's something of the night about documentary maker Greg Olliver's second 'fiction' film. Actually make that Night, as in M. Night Shyamalan. For this is a film WITH A TWIST, and by the saints does it spend the whole film letting you know that.

Lourdes is a Spanish woman working behind the scenes at a New York bar and restaurant, clearly with few employment prospects judging by her endurance of the abuse meted out to her by her female employer. As we watch her daily routines, often working into the night after all the guests have departed, we learn that she is in the US to earn enough money for her son's much needed operation back in Spain. We also learn that there are other shadowy presences in the resatuarant, just out of sight of Lourdes as she makes her rounds, which lead her (and us) to think that the place is haunted. Clearly struggling to build up some cash, she accepts the opportunity to increase her savings by going down on one of the diners who is looking for a quick thrill. Disgusted with her predicament, she nevertheless seems to repeat this service for other lone males as it appears lucrative. The shadowy figures become gradually more corporeal however, as Lourdes's predicament becomes ever more desperate.

That's about all I can tell you given the no spoiler policy of this blog. What I can mention is that Lourdes is found dead in the restaurant at the beginning of the movie, making Devoured a 'whydunit' instead of a 'whodunit'. Now the thing about a plot device like this is that the rest of the film has to be strong enough to make you forget the point where you started from, so that when the movie returns to the opening shot there's a renewed surprise and a sense of a satisfying ending. The problem with Devoured is that because the whole film is predicated upon THE TWIST it's presented in both a confusing and mundane way which is uninvolving - something which dogs many of Mr Shyamalan's films - so you never forget that Lourdes ends up dead.

I also found the central character of Lourdes similarly unengaging. Again, this is in service to THE TWIST (OK, I'll stop that now) but as she's in every scene in a film which is already flat and lifeless it made for a pretty tiresome watch. I may be in a minority here - many other reviewers have gone for this in a big way, mainly because of its 'indie' approach, similar to other recent films like The Pact and Lovely Molly. But despite its funky New York setting and some vaguely interesting camerawork, I found Devoured rather shallow and manipulative and not half as good as it obviously thinks it is.