Ask Mick LaSalle: Movies are a pretty lowdown form.
Dear Mick: I appreciate your ability to be highbrow yet readily admit to lowbrow tastes. “Mike and Dave Need Wedding Dates” was a great Sunday afternoon treat, and I’m almost 74!
Bill Levinson, Larkspur Dear Bill: Movies are a pretty lowdown form. They’re capable of lofty heights, but even at their loftiest, they rely on gut-level effects. Part of embracing movies is embracing their crudeness. That doesn’t mean liking everything, and it doesn’t mean celebrating vulgarity for its own sake. But it does mean recognizing that there is something about the form itself that is, essentially, vulgar, from Chaplin kicking a woman in the backside through “Mike and Dave Need Wedding Dates” — and that that vulgarity is not just an honest reflection of life but is also in tune with life. Dear Mick: Why did so many of the successful and glamorous actresses of Hollywood’s golden age (Gene Tierney comes to mind) have such sad final acts?
Dave Sironen, San Francisco Dear Dave: The first reason is that sad final acts — or at least final chapters — are pretty common. The last couple of years in anyone’s life usually aren’t a picnic. Another is that it can be very hard to be a movie star. Or as Edward G. Robinson put it, it’s easy to be a movie star, until the day you start worrying about someday not being a movie star. And it’s worse to be a woman in Hollywood, particularly during the Golden Age, because the career span, for most of them, was very short. Then add in the fact that artists tend to be sensitive, and that some are downright fragile. So it’s a lot of pressure and anxiety, a lot of being loved for an illusion (not your true self ), a lot of starving of the true self, followed by decline, dismissal and silence. There’s also this: Before the women’s movement, retired actresses could barely leave the house without a tabloid gloating over the loss of their looks. So it’s hard to grow into a new self and become something better in maturity. And no one feels sorry for you. No matter how miserable you feel, no one has any pity for you, because they all wish they were movie stars themselves. Dear Mick LaSalle: When you responded to a reader’s discovery of the adorable Marion Davies, your list of her appeal and talents did not include her incredible impressions of other actresses. My favorite is in “The Patsy,” where she does Lillian Gish to perfection.
Ken Kirste, Sunnyvale Dear Ken Kirste: This is true and worth remembering. It also reminds me of something peculiar. After you’ve seen a few Marion Davies movies, check out Joan Crawford in “Montana Moon” (1930). In her early days, Crawford was notorious for stealing from other actresses, almost flat-out imitating them in her own performances. In “Montana Moon,” she imitates Marion Davies — something that only very, very few people would recognize today. Like a lot of Crawford-related things, it’s very weird. Dear Mick: Do you ever have trouble reconciling your view of a director’s movies with public pronouncements? I love Clint Eastwood for two movies in particular, “Mystic River” and “Gran Torino.” I choose to ignore Eastwood’s politics but have a hard time reconciling the deep human vision onscreen with the public political man.
Bob Petersen, Santa Cruz Dear Bob: I have no problem separating a director’s politics from his worldview, so long as the politics don’t infect the worldview, or so long as the worldview isn’t toxic. I don’t find Eastwood’s politics toxic, just cranky, but I do find his public pronouncements puzzling, not because they’re particularly objectionable — I can disagree with an opinion without labeling it objectionable — but because they don’t sound like they were made by the same guy who makes the movies. I just assume this is Eastwood’s sly attempt to convince everyone he’s an idiot savant.