Tribeca ’15: Anniversary Screenings

In fourteen years, the Tribeca Film Festival has grown into an impressive institution, with well-respected grant-writing and film distribution arms. Still, the thirteenth anniversary just isn’t a very round number. However, this year’s Tribeca Film Festival will commemorate a number of films reaching milestones ending with fives and zeroes. Best of all, several of these special screening will be free of charge (although advance ticketing is still required in some cases).

You might have missed the anticipation for the 30^th anniversary of Clue the movie, based on the perennially popular board game, which is why Tribeca’s free Drive-In screening is such a public service. Jonathan Lynn’s film was not kindly reviewed at the time, but in retrospect, we can acknowledge it as one of his wittiest works since the Yes, Minister franchise. The spooky old house set is wonderfully detailed and the all-star cast is relentlessly hammy—in a good way. The random uncredited Howard Hesseman sightings also add a dash of surreal humor, but the real star is the deliciously caustic dialogue. Lynn pushes the rapid-fire delivery, as if he broke out Howard Hawks’ old stop-watch. There are actually more films based on board games these days, but Clue remains the best. It screens for free this Thursday (4/16) at the World Financial Plaza.

In 1985, all the love denied Clue was showered on Robert Zemeckis’ Back to the Future, which has become iconic for a reason. The effects were pretty cool for its time, but it had tons of heart. It heralded Michael J. Fox’s apparent arrival as a big time movie star, but despite some successful subsequent releases, Back to the Future 1 remains his cinematic high-water mark. As likable as he and Christopher Lloyd are together, it is impossible to think of the film without hearing Huey Lewis’s Power of Love in your mind’s ear, but that just proves how all the elements truly came together for it. Nostalgically recommended, it screens for free at the BMCC on Saturday (4/25).

Back to the Future presents a very innocent, 1950s version of love, but it is nowhere near as endearing as Disney’s Lady and the Tramp, celebrating its sixtieth anniversary. Arguably, the spaghetti sequence is the first movie moment that suggests to boys and girls kissing scenes might be okay after all. Let’s face it, the film is just adorable, plus it features the sassy vocals of Peggy Lee, performing original songs she co-wrote with Sonny Burke. Parents should take their kids to see it at the Drive-In this Friday (4/17), before Disney cheapens it with another live-action remake.

If you like Peggy Lee (and who the heck doesn’t?), you’re probably okay with Frank Sinatra too. 2015 marks the Sinatra centennial (1915-1998), so Tribeca will celebrate with free screenings of On the Town, Some Came Running, and High Society (trailer here). They are all worth seeing, but the latter is particularly notable. A musical remake of The Philadelphia Story, it co-stars Sinatra in the Jimmy Stewart role, Bing Crosby fearlessly stepping in for Cary Grant, and Grace Kelly in her final film, assuming Katherine Hepburn’s duties. Yes, Philadelphia is the better film, but Society has one thing the other lacks: Louis Armstrong, playing himself.

In fact, Armstrong gets the sort of star treatment he lacked in some of his more problematic early films. He serves as a sort of narrator in the opening and closing segments and performs a flat-out flag-waver, “Now You Has Jazz,” with Crosby. Perhaps the coolest aspect of the number is that each of the All-Stars gets a brief solo, introduced by Crosby. At this time, the line-up consisted of Trummy Young (trombone), Billy Kyle (piano), Arvell Shaw (bass), Barrett Deems (drums), and the New Orleans legend in his own right, Edmond Hall on clarinet (but sadly, no Velma Middleton). Society was also the first full screen musical Cole Porter had written in a number of years. It might not be his most memorable work, but there are flashes of that classic wit, like “have you heard, its in the stars, next July we collide with Mars” in “Well, Did You Evah!” It screens at the Regal Battery Park next Friday (4/24), but you’re going to have to deal with rush tickets at this point.

Perhaps the biggest ticket anniversary will be Monty Python and the Holy Grail celebrating forty years of lunacy. In fact, there will be several decidedly not-free Python screenings at Tribeca, as well as the premiere of the documentary Monty Python: the Meaning of Live chronicling their live performances at London’s O2 Arena, designed to pay-off their lawyers’ fees and Terry Jones’ mortgage (full review to come). The Rifftrax guys will also give the live treatment to Tommy Wiseau’s The Room, which is only marking its twelfth anniversary, but it feels like it has always been with us. Altogether, it is an interesting selection of old favorites programmed (sometimes for free, sometime not, check the website) at this year’s Tribeca Film Festival.

Jimmy Van Heusen: Swingin’ with Frank & Bing

What sort of a tune does a test pilot write? Well, there was the Sinatra staple “Come Fly with Me.” Sinatra fans might already know the vocalist recorded more tunes by Jimmy Van Heusen than anyone else, but the extent to which the composer served as Old Blue Eye’s Obi-wan could still come as a surprise. Van Heusen’s life and body of work are surveyed in Jim Burn’s Jimmy Van Heusen: Swingin’ with Frank & Bing (promo here), which airs on participating PBS stations at various times throughout the month of August.

In a sense, Van Heusen is an apostolic link from Tin Pan Alley and the original Great American Songwriters, like Irving Berlin, to the Swinging Madmen 1960s. As a man who felt instinctively at home in a nightclub or tavern, Van Heusen was ideally suited to be a song-plugger. Tunes like “Darn that Dream” quickly caught on, but it was his association with Bing Crosby that took Van Heusen’s career to a higher level. Following the crooner to Hollywood, Van Heusen wrote scores of hits with lyricist Johnny Burke, including the Oscar winning “Swinging on a Star,” for Going My Way. Shrewdly, the accomplished aviator volunteered as a test pilot for Lockheed during World War II, as a way to maintain his high-flying Hollywood lifestyle while serving the war effort.

When Crosby cooled off, Van Heusen found himself at loose ends, along with his old pal from New York, Frank Sinatra. Rumor has it, Van Heusen interceded during the baritone’s darkest hours and he would pen tunes with his new regularly lyricist partner Sammy Cahn that defined the Sinatra comeback. Swingin’s best segments trace the surprising origins of some of their most popular songs, such as “Love & Marriage” written for a television musical production of Our Town, featuring Sinatra as the Stage Manager and Paul Newman and Eva Marie Saint as the teenaged lovers, which frustratingly is not likely to be released on home video anytime soon.

Burns also talks to all the right people, including Frank Sinatra, Jr., Woody Allen, jazz musicians Dr. Billy Taylor and John Pizzarelli, jazz-cabaret crossover performers Jane Monheit and Eric Comstock, and Angie Dickinson and Shirley MacLaine to vouch for Van Heusen’s charm. There are also generous helpings of performance clips, largely focusing on Sinatra and Crosby, for obvious reasons.

Swingin’ will make viewers nostalgic for the glory days of the hard partying yet patriotic Rat Pack. In fact, writer-director Burns makes a persuasive case for Van Heusen as Rat Packer Zero, the one who started it all. Clocking in around the hour mark, the special could have run fifty percent longer without overstaying its welcome. The entertaining and informative Jimmy Van Heusen: Swingin’ with Frank & Bing airs on various PBS outlets throughout the month of August, so check local listings.

Pledge-Breaking: Feinstein’s Sinatra Legacy

It might sound like hyperbole when Michael Feinstein tells viewers his concert at the Palladium in Carmel in Indiana is one of the high points of his career. However, the recently opened state-of-the-art theater (that will soon host the likes of Wynton Marsalis, Yo-Yo Ma, and Tony Bennett) not only booked Feinstein for a special Sinatra tribute concert, but also hired him as their artistic director, so he should be excited to play there. Recorded in the newly minted hall this May, Michael Feinstein: the Sinatra Legacy (promo here) is clearly packaged with PBS pledge-breaks in mind, but it is still a totally legit up-scale sophisticated musical evening in its own right, which airs this coming Thursday on New York’s Thirteen.

It is no secret Sinatra was a formative influence on Feinstein. Yet, rather than just re-do everything Sinatra already did so well, Feinstein takes a wider approach to the “Voice’s” canon. He does indeed tackle an iconic Sinatra staple like “Fly Me to the Moon,” but Feinstein re-arranges it back into the romantic ballad first conceived by songwriter Bart Howard under the original title “In Other Words”. Conversely, Feinstein gives the full Nelson Riddle treatment to Cole Porter’s “Begin the Beguine,” a song Sinatra only performed early in his career.

Appropriately, Feinstein also follows a Sinatra-like approach to orchestrations in general, employing a big reasonably swinging band and a considerable string section behind him. He even allows for a few brief solos. While essentially embellished melody statements, the spotlighted musicians still get enough camera time for their families to recognize them, which is cool. Feinstein even displays his piano chops a bit, starting several tunes at the ivories (before handing off to musical director Bill Elliott) and even showing off somewhat on the pure instrumental rendition of Ary Barroso’s “Brazil” (famously featured in Disney’s Saludos Amigos, clip here). In fact, it is arguably the highlight of the concert, particularly for jazz and samba listeners.

Feinstein’s adapts his performance patter rather well for the expansive hall and his knowledge of the Great American Songbook (over and beyond Sinatra’s repertoire) is justly famed. While it might be too cabaret for hardcore big band connoisseurs, it is about as jazz as PBS gets these days. A nice concert of standards that should please fans of Sinatra and Feinstein, Legacy airs this coming Thursday (8/11) in New York, but do not be shocked if someone interrupts the show to ask for money.
 (Photos: Zach Dobson)

Jazz Score: Man with the Golden Arm

A jazz musician suffering from drug addiction—imagine such a thing. Yet that is the subject of Otto Preminger’s Man with the Golden Arm (partial trailer here, dig the Saul Bass design). Based on Nelson Algren’s novel, Arm is a mixed bag, distinguished by its music and Frank Sinatra’s performance as Frankie Machine, the man with an arm for drumming that he abuses with a needle.

Arm had a reputation at the time for being brutally frank in its depiction of addiction, and Sinatra does indeed deliver in those scenes. Machine has just returned from taking the cure in Lexington, but he now must face all the same old problems and temptations. His wife Zosh pretends to be confined to a wheelchair to exploit Machine’s guilt over their fateful accident. Louis the pusher immediately pursues Machine, both as a customer and as a card dealer in his associate’s illegal card games, where Machine’s arm was first dubbed golden.

As part of his treatment, Machine learned to play drums. With the help of a reform-minded agent, he hopes to find better employment for that golden arm. Ironically, life on the road with jazz musicians is portrayed as an escape from the temptation of drugs.

Arm tries strives for realism, but sometimes looks odd in retrospect. The mean streets of Chicago look more like an old-fashioned neighborhood. Darren McGavin is effectively creepy in keys scenes, as he tries to lure Machine back on the needle again, but dressed in his jacket and vest, with handkerchief and umbrella in tow, he looks more like a villain from 1920’s England than the mean streets of 1950’s Chicago.

Elmer Bernstein’s score was the first jazz-influenced soundtrack to be nominated for an academy award. Full of foreboding, yet still swinging, Arm is the prototypical sound of what would come to be dubbed “crime jazz.” It features West Coast jazz greats Shorty Rogers and Shelly Manne, who even appear as themselves during Machine’s ill-fated audition.

If you have seen Travolta pop the syringe full of adrenaline through Uma Thurman’s sternum in Pulp Fiction, Arm might seem a little tame overall. However, when Machine kicks cold turkey, it is pretty serious stuff, even by today’s standards. The film honestly represents some of Sinatra’s best screen work.

According to Chris Fujiwara’s The World and Its Double, Preminger notoriously rubbed Algren the wrong way and took great liberties with the screen adaptation. By cutting the class-warfare elements and giving the film a redemptive conclusion, Preminger actually made the film more relevant to more people. It screens as part of MoMA’s Jazz Score series April 26th and 27th.