Moviegoer Diary: The Last Movie, Fatso

THE LAST MOVIE

Plot In A Nutshell
Dennis Hopper’s 1971 flop about a stuntman on a Western being filmed in Peru who stays behind after the shoot is over, and watches as the lingering influence of the Hollywood visitors corrupts the townspeople.

Thoughts
I suppose it says something about my contrarian streak that I’ve never been too interested in seeing Easy Rider but I’ve long been determined to track down The Last Movie — especially after reading the crazy stories about it in Peter Biskind’s Easy Riders, Raging Bulls. My favourite involves a documentary about Hopper called American Dreamer that Kit Carson and Larry Schiller were making during the protracted editing process of The Last Movie; supposedly Carson and Schiller wanted to film Hopper walking naked through downtown Los Alamos, which Hopper agreed to do — provided that in return, they organized an orgy for him with “50 beautiful girls.” (Hilariously, it was during this party that Universal executive Ned Tanen arrived to talk to Hopper about his progress on The Last Movie.)

Sadly, despite some interesting quasi-Herzogian themes about the reckless inauthenticity of the filmmaking process and the battle between civilization and savagery (a battle that heavily favours savagery), The Last Movie is a formless mess. I’m not surprised that it took Hopper so long to edit the picture — when you’ve got a lot of vaguely expressed themes and no narrative whatsoever, your options when you arrive in the editing room are pretty much limitless. The movie is so casually structured that it’s 13 minutes into the film before the words “a film by Dennis Hopper” appear... and then another 13 before “THE LAST MOVIE” shows up onscreen. It takes even longer than that before we get a properly shaped scene — although the footage of Samuel Fuller, playing himself as the director of the movie-within-the-movie, barking orders left and right is fairly entertaining.

According to Biskind, Hopper originally wrote the part for Montgomery Clift, and indeed, the movie might have made more sense with an older actor in the lead — a man at the end of his career, looking to start over someplace unspoiled, only to find that his very presence corrupts everything he sees. With Hopper playing the role, the character never quite computes — sometimes the guy feels like a wide-eyed innocent, tongue-tied around his elders, and other times he’s a brute who doesn’t hesitate to beat up his Peruvian girlfriend when she fails to show him the proper respect.

The tone of the film keeps shifting as well: the shots of the Peruvian villagers “shooting” their own film with cameras made out of wicker but real violence, are like something out of Alejandro Jodorowsky. (In fact, Biskind says Hopper showed a rough cut of the film to Jodorowky, hoping for his approval, and was bitterly disappointed when the El Topo creator dismissed it as a conventional Hollywood product.) But Hopper also throws in a few Godardian touches: at a couple of points in the action, title cards reading “SCENE MISSING” are thrown up on the screen, and instead of the climax we’re expecting (an ending that bears a strong resemblance to The Wicker Man, released two years later), we get a protracted coda that seems to consist of outtakes and footage of the actors clowning around between takes. Hopper the actor seems to have lost interest in the film along with Hopper the director: “I wanna get this thing over with,” he mutters. “I got a lot of things I want to do.”

Me too — let’s move on.

RATING: 1.5/5

* * * * *
FATSO

Plot In A Nutshell
Bittersweet comedy/drama from 1980 — Anne Bancroft’s sole film as writer/director — starring Dom DeLuise as an overweight Italian man fighting a losing battle against his expanding waistline.

Thoughts
I had heard good things about Fatso, and decided to check it out following the death of Dom DeLuise last week. The film begins, ghoulishly enough, with a funeral — this one for DeLuise’s even more overweight cousin Sal. The entire sequence epitomizes the delicate tone Bancroft achieves throughout the film, a tricky balance of wild humour (not unlike what you’d find in the films of her husband Mel Brooks) and realistic, grounded performances. There’s a wonderful bit, for instance, where DeLuise goes into the kitchen during the wake; he’s weeping, but at the same time, he’s stirring the gigantic pot of sauce bubbling on the stove, tasting it and adding pepper in between sobs. The scene could easily have been played much more broadly — and God knows DeLuise is capable of going broad — but instead it feels both funny and convincingly in character. (Actually it’s Bancroft herself, playing DeLuise’s sister Antoinette, who goes broad in this sequence — she has a fearlessly funny bit where she starts screaming at the dead guy in the casket before collapsing in tears. Italians! They’re an emotional bunch!)

There are a couple of sequences where you can’t help but wonder if a few of Brooks’ suggestions found their way into the finished product. I’m thinking especially of a scene where DeLuise has put padlocks on the refrigerator and all the kitchen cupboards and told his brother (Ron Carey, a Brooks regular) not to open them, no matter how hard he begs. (Shades of Young Frankenstein, right?) An uproarious scene follows in which DeLuise wakes Carey up in the middle of the night and threatens him at knifepoint to cough up the keys. Carey is able to shame him into dropping the knife — whereupon he picks up the knife and starts chasing DeLuise around with it, outraged that he’d pull a knife on his kid brother. Then, when Carey calms down and drops the knife, DeLuise picks it right back up and starts demanding the keys again.

It should be said that Bancroft doesn’t direct this scene the way Brooks would — instead of shoving the camera in the actors’ faces, she keeps her distance and lets the action play out in a couple of long, unbroken takes. The same goes for the bit where DeLuise is visited by a couple of guys from “Chubby Checkers,” the weight-loss support group he’s joined. They’re supposed to talk him out of his urge to binge, but the three of them get so worked up talking about the food they want that they all wind up pigging out together. (“Get the honey!” the biggest one tells Carey, his bulk casting an eclipse-sized shadow over his face.)

Fatso may be the most humane American comedy ever made about being overweight. (Jeff Garlin’s I Want Someone to Eat Cheese With is another contender, but it’s not nearly as funny.) DeLuise is a revelation here, so disciplined in his performance, especially in a bitter, climactic monologue where he shouts at a picture of his dead mother, accusing her of turning him into a pathetic fatso. And his relationship with Lydia (Candice Azzara), the pretty proprietor of a neighbourhood antique store, is very sweet. She sells gemstones, and there’s a small pun in the fact that her favourite is apatite. But like everything else in this buried treasure, Bancroft doesn’t push the joke very hard.

RATING: 4.5/5