ASK MICK LASALLE
Hello Mick LaSalle: I caught “What Ever Happened to Baby Jane?” this past week. I found myself spellbound by Bette Davis’ performance. Over the top? Yes. But she drew me in. She appeared to be acting with her entire body. I now call it a bravura performance in a camp movie. Your thoughts?
Michael Lewis, San Francisco
Hello Michael Lewis: I think you’re appreciating that acting isn’t always about being real. It’s about being true, a wider, more magical and yet more rigorous category. When I was a kid, I used to think that Gloria Swanson was wildly over the top in “Sunset Boulevard” and that that was a bad thing. Now I see that she was wildly over the top and that that was a good thing. There are all kinds of great acting, and Davis’ unreal, inspired, intuitive Kabuki performance in “What Ever Happened to Baby Jane?” definitely qualifies.
Hi Mick: I saw two good old Spencer Tracy movies, “20,000 Years in Sing Sing” — Spence was still a little hammy and not yet underplaying — and “Dante’s Inferno,” which, for some reason, he disowned. Do you know what that was about?
Rich Sigberman, Marin County
Hi Rich: Spencer Tracy was not an appealing guy in his early movies. In role after role, he was nasty and blustering and particularly hostile toward women. But then he worked at Fox, which was the crudest of the studios. As for “Dante’s Inferno” (1935), he seems to have been under the false impression that it was a bad movie. He also was leaving Fox for MGM, so he knew it didn’t matter if he badmouthed Fox.
Dear Mick: I’ve tried to watch “In the Cut” in its entirety, and I’ve failed all three times. When you say it will be a “future classic,” aren’t you confusing it with the same director’s ( Jane Campion’s) “The Portrait of a Lady”? And why “In the Cut” and not “Looking for Mr. Goodbar”?
Joyce Tyler, Pasadena
Dear Joyce: First of all, not every great movie is going to appeal to you, so if you tried three times, you might as well give up. I don’t love every great movie, either. “In the Cut” is imperfect, in that it’s made as a thriller and has to deliver on that genre promise by the finish. But it’s really a hard, serious movie about civilization’s perversion of natural impulse, about human longing in collision with social structure — subjects that Campion has dealt with before, but here she does it with no preciousness or loftiness at all. As for “Looking for Mr. Goodbar,” it’s a movie about sex and sexual mores, but it’s very tied to its time, very conscious of showing you something new and transgressive. As such, there is just a hint that the people making it thought they were showing you something kinda cool, which keeps it out of the realm of seriousness but makes it a worthy time capsule. “In the Cut” is more timeless, less a response to contemporary mores and more keyed into universal human themes and needs.
Dear Mick: Chain stores are ubiquitous in American life, yet we rarely see them in films. Why? Film characters eat in quaint diners, never chain fast-food restaurants.
Kevin Steed, Oakland
Dear Kevin: Well, if they go to a chain restaurant, they’re going to have to eat something, and it’s an accepted mythology in American movies that heroes don’t eat. They just drink coffee, and never any fun coffee, either, like a Frappuccino, but black coffee. No sugar. And if they have anything in their refrigerators, it’s a lonely carton of takeout from a Chinese restaurant — Chinese food apparently symbolizing what protagonists eat when they give no thought to food until they’re starving. It’s an insult to Chinese cuisine and to all of us who believe that eating a decent meal and ordering the occasional soy chai latte are no impediment to functioning in the world.
Have a question? Ask Mick LaSalle at mlasalle@sfchronicle.com. Include your name and city for publication, and a phone number for verification. Letters may be edited for clarity and length.