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86 | Sight&Sound | May 2020Along with a venomous foray into
the teen movie (O.C. and Stiggs, 1985),
Altman’s 80s were largely occupied with forays
into television (Tanner ’88 in 1988, Vincent &
Theo in 1990) and theatre, both directing for the
stage and filming stage work. Beyond Therapy
belongs to the last-named category, based on
Christopher Durang’s off-Broadway hit, though
significantly rewritten by Altman, to the
displeasure of Durang, who wrote that Altman
“throws the psychological underpinnings out
the window, and people just run around acting
‘crazy’”. This is not inaccurate, nor is it a demerit
for those with a fondness for the screwball
tradition who never worried too much about
how John Barrymore and Carole Lombard
in Twentieth Century (1934) got that way.
Here we’ve got an ensemble of zanies that
fans out around a central triangular relationship
consisting of Bob (Christopher Guest); his
bisexual live-in boyfriend, Bruce (Jeff Goldblum);
and the girl Bruce meets through a personal ad
in New York Magazine, Prudence (Julie Hagerty,
one of our finest comediennes). On their first
date, Bruce sucks Prudence’s toe unbidden, and
soon after proffers: “I was gonna take you to
see a revival of The Tree of Wooden Clogs, then
home to my place for sexual intercourse?” The
rapid-fire discourse of dizzy dysfunctionals
scarcely lets up from here, and what might have
been a cosy yuppie comedy of manners turns
into something nearer to Antonin Artaud, the
aggression overlaid with a strange sweetness.
(Various renditions of ‘Someone to Watch over
Me’ act as the film’s theme song.) Manic and
moony, it’s the film of someone with nothing left
to lose, redolent of the freedom of the wilderness.
Disc: A more than creditable transfer
and a theatrical trailer.BUSTER KEATON:
3 FILMS VOLUME 2
THE NAVIGATOR/SEVEN CHANCES/
BATTLING BUTLER
Buster Keaton; US 1924/1925/1926; Eureka Masters of
Cinema; Region B Blu-ray; Certificate U; 204 minutes; 1.33:1.
Extras: The Navigator – commentary by film historians Robert
Arkus and Yair Solan and short making-of doc; video essay
on all three films by David Cairns; Keaton radio interviews;
comic short What! No Spinach? (Harry Sweet 1926); booklet.
Reviewed by Philip Concannon
Whenever he was asked how he developed
his gag-filled narratives, Buster Keaton had a
stock answer: he never worked with a script.
Instead, he and his team would come up with
a premise and then jump ahead to work out a
strong ending. After that, he’d say, “We always
figured the middle would take care of itself.”
The three films in Eureka’s latest batch of
Keaton features offer an interesting study
in Keaton’s approach to storytelling. That
improvisatory approach is most evident in
The Navigator (1924), one of Keaton’s personal
favourites among his own work. The film came
about when Keaton’s art director Fred Gabourie
was offered access to an ageing ship that was
about to be sold for scrap. Having figured out a
premise (boy and girl alone on a drifting liner) and
an ending (a rather crude cannibal encounter),
Keaton set to work exploiting the vessel’sarchitecture for laughs. The business of getting
the characters on board in the first place is a little
laborious, but the extended sequence in which
Keaton and Kathryn McGuire roam around the
ship, each oblivious to the other’s presence, is
one of his most exquisitely choreographed.
In Seven Chances (1925) and Battling Butler
(1926), Keaton built on a more solid narrative
base, both films having been adapted from
popular stage shows. He may have had mixed
feelings about Seven Chances, a property foisted
on him by producer Joe Schenck, but he took
the opportunity to create an epic chase sequence
that exceeded the free-for-all at the end of his
two-reeler Cops (1922). The climactic pursuit
of Keaton’s hapless bachelor by hundreds
of would-be brides – and by just as many
boulders, added after a preview screening –
takes up almost half of this hour-long feature
and displays his peerless ability to sustain
endlessly inventive large-scale set pieces.
That kind of spectacular, death-defying
sequence is notably absent from the underrated
mistaken-identity farce Battling Butler, an
adaptation of a successful musical that, crucially,
was instigated by Keaton himself rather than
Schenck. The comedy here is played in a more
sedate and intimate register, and Keaton shares
some lovely moments with Sally O’Neil,
the pair so enraptured in conversation they
fail to notice the table sinking into the soft
ground beneath them. But what distinguishes
Battling Butler and makes it such an outlier is
the way Keaton choose to resolve the story.
A cowardly figure reluctantly pressed into a
boxing match is a staple setup for the great screen
clowns – see Charlie Chaplin in City Lights (1931)
or Jerry Lewis in Sailor Beware (1952) – but there’s
something jarring and powerful about the raw
explosion of rage that this film ends with, as
Keaton engages in a genuinely violent struggle
for survival. The unexpected darkness of this
climax might be why Battling Butler is regarded by
many as a lesser Keaton work, but it does present
the Great Stone Face in a fascinating new light.
Discs: These 4K restorations from L’Immagine
Ritrovata and Cohen Film Collection’s ongoing
Keaton Project are rich and detailed – the sepia-
toned Battling Butler looks particularly splendid.
The package includes a video essay by David
Cairns and Harry Sweet’s short What! No Spinach?
(1926), which shamelessly (and shabbily) rips
off Seven Chances, but the highlight is a seriesof radio interviews with Keaton. He’s prone to
repetition, but offers insightful observations
on everything from the artful construction
of a gag to the politics of pie-throwing.CYRANO DE BERGERAC
Jean-Paul Rappeneau; France 1990; BFI; Region B
Blu-ray; Certificate U; 138 minutes; 1.66:1. Extras:
commentary by Ginette Vincendeau; interviews
with Gérard Depardieu, Rappeneau; Anthony
Burgess in conversation with A.S. Byatt; Depardieu in
conversation at the NFT, 1987 (audio only); booklet
Reviewed by David Thompson
Jean-Paul Rappeneau’s rich and brilliantly paced
adaptation of Edmond Rostand’s immortal
French play still holds up as an exemplary
transfer of a stage work to screen, with the lavish
enterprise kept in focus by an outstanding central
performance from Gérard Depardieu at his peak.
Rostand was writing at the close of the 19th
century about a near-mythical figure from the
mid-17th century, a master swordsman whose
literary talents inspired (and were probably
even stolen by) Molière. Of course, Cyrano’s
salient attribute was (supposedly) the length
of his nose, the subject of much verbal jousting
but also the cause of his romantic shyness
towards his object of desire, his beautiful cousin
Roxane (Anne Brochet). Here the inevitable fake
proboscis is astutely judged – nothing like as
extreme as the one sported by Steve Martin in his
updated version, Roxanne (1987), but certainly
not insignificant (the recent London theatrical
production with James McAvoy dispensed
with it altogether, for reasons hard to justify).
What’s striking 30 years on is how far
Rappeneau, working with co-scenarist Jean-
Claude Carrière, respects the language of the
play – the constant rhyming Alexandrines, with
their six beats, are delivered with a beguiling
naturalism, and never seem at odds with the
sensitive location filming. At the time the most
expensive production ever mounted in France,
the film opens out the play in the scenes of the
siege of Arras, but adheres to its original five-act
structure, using the figure of a young boy to lead
us right from the start into the magical world
of the theatre and help sustain a sense of awe
for these larger-than-life figures. Rappeneau’s
direction is full of intelligent movement and
appropriate ‘panache’, and if Jean-Claude Petit’s
musical score occasionally goes off-period,
invoking the dreamy swirl of Danny Elfman’s
work for Tim Burton, that was entirely intentional
(and the subject of a lawsuit, even). Cyrano de
Bergerac undoubtedly harks back to post-war
French cinema’s ‘tradition of quality’, once so
derided by François Truffaut, but it’s also one of
the finest examples of that style on offer. Even
Rappeneau himself failed to match it again with
his subsequent star-driven, large scale movies.
Disc: A luscious 4K transfer, and – as on the
film’s original theatrical release – the use of
Anthony Burgess’s rhyming subtitles (derived
from his own performing translation) is perfect.
The commentary is informative but since the
long interviews with Burgess (on witty form)
and Depardieu (who presents his interpreter
with quite a challenge) were conducted
Ship of fools: The Navigator (1924) before 1990, Cyrano is not discussed.New releases