DVD OF THE WEEK: Skidoo
by Vadim Rizov
Otto Preminger's 1968 satire
Skidoo takes its title from a word dating back to the 1920s, meaning to get out while the getting's good. "Perhaps the first truly national fad expression and one of the most popular fad expressions to appear in the U.S.," says an edition of the
Dictionary of American Slang from that later decade. That old jargon is used to describe fresh developments captures the film's central tension well: Preminger, who defied the Production Code by using the word "virgin" in 1953's
The Moon is Blue and bluntly delved into the blackmailing of homosexuals in 1962's
Advise and Consent (among his other battles with censorship), was no longer on the leading edge of pushing culture to new levels of permissiveness. But by
Skidoo, using outmoded slang to tag a saga of free love and LSD comes off as an elderly guy throwing embarrassing jive at the kids.
Skidoo features
Jackie Gleason asking "What is he, a faggot?", and near-objectively portrays the fault lines of the '60s a year before
Easy Rider and
Medium Cool busted the counterculture open for adventurous multiplex viewing, yet has always been synonymous with irredeemable failure. (See also:
Ishtar,
Heaven's Gate, and other re-evaluated cases.)
Skidoo isn't the sad attempt of a former taboo-buster to get hep with the rebels he helped spawn: it's exactly the sour but well-argued film Preminger intended rather than a jaw-dropping fiasco.
Gleason's abovementioned crudeness (an outcry in response to his daughter's hippie paramour) positions him as the logical descendant of
The Honeymooners' Ralph Kramden and the predecessor to Archie Bunker, all ruddy prole instincts. Despite his biases against the psychedelic and flower-powered, Gleason's hitman "Tough Tony" Banks becomes a far better human being in jail (he's there to do one last job for the boss) than he is at home, defending a fellow prisoner's right to eat brown rice without being mocked and eventually choosing pacifism over hardhat self-righteousness. The film plays like a daring sitcom, appropriately opening with Tough Tony in front of the tube. Fleeting snippets aside, the two main components of the manically edited channel-surfing session are a clip of Preminger's own
In Harm's Way (the last traditional epic he was able to make before becoming studio persona non grata) and ads of a woman decrying the "fat, disgusting" man Gleason resembles, whose maladies could be cured with deodorant. The self-loathing intro (with the word "An Otto Preminger Film" on the TV, as if this were just another night of lazy viewing) packs a world of insecurity and hatefulness before any of the characters even open their mouths.
Tough Tony is old-school, a dinosaur as antiquated as former mob boss God (
Groucho Marx, in his final screen appearance?don't ask). Subversive casting is prevalent, i.e. "Mickey Mouse Club" mainstay
Frankie Avalon as a particularly sleazy hood. Preminger films don't normally have stupidly obtrusive scores, but
Harry Nilsson's sarcastically perky contributions somehow inform a widescreen laff-fest. Gleason stays offscreen for much of the film, but the perspective is firmly his: a quasi-libertarian, tolerant-as-long-as-it's-not-my-daughter viewpoint. The hippies are first represented by Stash (
John Philip Law), who mumbles about "you dig" (re: the nothingness of everything) to Tough Tony's daughter Darlene (
Alexandra Hay) before moving in for the big make-out session?Gleason's right to suspect lecherous skullduggery in his vacuous pronouncements, which tend towards a debased form of Zen where everything is nothing, beauty is everywhere and stoned bromides will change the world. The righteous locals, though, are equally myopic and closed off. "I do not know what brought you to my township, and I do not care to know," Tough Tony's shrill wife (
Carol Channing) announces to a hippie gang at a town meeting, heavy-handedly backdropped by dual portraits of George Washington and
Ronald Reagan. "We are proud of ourselves, our clean upright citizens, junior and senior. You are a backwards step in the evolution of mankind."
The plot infamously includes a climactic LSD trip, and it's typical of Preminger's characteristic pragmatism that the moment isn't just one of psychic transcendence, but also necessary for Tough Tony to get out of jail. The hallucinations look like a bunch of moving trash-can lids as filtered through a cheap kaleidoscope. Preminger's films rarely indulge in showy, attention-grabbing shots or heavy editing, preferring unblinking wide shots that give performers room to breathe. Trying to depict a hallucinogenic experience subjectively onscreen is always a crapshoot, and Preminger's approach turns the transformative experience into an accidental farce, undermining any alleged change in Gleason's character. Like a bad actor not getting the point of playing Scrooge, his final epiphany into embracing tolerance actually makes him less appealing, his articulate anger mellowing into dumb bliss.
Skidoo's screenplay is by
Doran William Cannon, who wrote the equally half-baked, generational-discontent saga
Brewster McCloud, which
Robert Altman subsequently bent into something stranger. As reported in Chris Fujiwara's
The World and Its Double: The Life and Work of Otto Preminger, Cannon was displeased by the director's methodical approach to his screenplay. Actor Austin Pendleton describes the original script's main virtue as having "a tone that was very much happening," which sounds dubiously like nothing at all. On the set, Preminger was also working with his son Erik (the product of a fling with stripper
Gypsy Lee Rose) after being forbidden for many years to see him, and it could be said that
Skidoo plays like the work of a father striving to bond with his child whose worldview he disagrees with entirely.
There are lots of films extolling the virtues of adolescent rebellion and experimentation (if not so many when the film was actually made), but few sympathetic to the viewpoints of their scared, left-behind parents. For all the joking around and outre plot twists,
Skidoo may be the only film of the '60s that offers a plausible portrait of what a well-meaning dad (as opposed to a mobster) might make of the changes around him, serving as a referendum on the new youth culture from the reactionary side of the fence, with scorn and sympathy depicted toward both sides. It may not be "funny," but it's curiously and compellingly disorienting.
Skidoo's sympathy for those too old and set in their ways to adjust to changing times remains surprising long after its more progressive counterparts have folded into the mainstream. Forget motorcycles and Steppenwolf; try Jackie Gleason sweating and the slow, protracted descent into illogic foisted on an old man who didn't ask for any of this.
Posted by ahillis at July 19, 2011 2:15 PM
No comments:
Post a Comment