Jack Palance

Le mépris [Contempt] (1963)

Le mépris [Contempt] (1963)

(On Cable TV, July 2019) There are a few things colliding in Le Mépris. Writer-director Jean-Luc Godard shows us what happens when a marriage crashes into a film production, comparing the nitty-gritty of making a movie and the heightened melodrama of a suddenly disintegrating relationship. The film stars Brigitte Bardot in of her most dramatically challenging roles, as her picture-perfect sex-appeal bolsters her role as a woman who realizes that her husband is trying to sell her to a film producer in an attempt to get more money. Cue the titular but no less furious contempt. The anti-romantic plot thread is perhaps best exemplified by a very long sequence midway through the film in which the married couple argues in measured terms throughout their apartment—the kind of sequence that makes film students think about the use of space and character separation. The other subplot, about the multilingual production of a movie based on The Odyssey, is far droller: Featuring no less than Fritz Lang in an amusing role as the film director, it also stars a young Jack Palance as a hard-driving film producer who may or may not be interested in Bardot’s character. The banter here is far funnier than expected, what with a poor translator trying her best efforts to bring together a cast and crew speaking four languages, Lang arguing about the meaning of The Odyssey, and metatextual glimpses at a movie production. The blend of two tones and styles is provocative, especially when they literally involve a car crash at the climax, resolving a few plot threads in far too convenient a manner. Much of Le mépris is interesting; much of it is long—ultimately, it’s up to the viewer to pick and choose their favourite parts.

City Slickers (1991)

City Slickers (1991)

(Second viewing, On Cable TV, June 2018) I hadn’t seen City Slickers since the mid-nineties, and I had forgotten quite a bit about it—including what makes it so good. Beyond Jack Palance’s tough-cowboy performance (which led to an Oscar win and the infamous one-armed push-up acceptance speech that I saw on live TV) and Billy Crystal’s usual nebbish charm, City Slickers is built around a solid core of personal rediscovery, as well as an accompanying constellation of recurring gags, strong comic personalities playing off each other, and more throwaway gags than I remembered. Crystal is great, but the ensemble around him also works wonders at driving the film forward. Deftly playing with western archetypes and references (most specifically to Red River, which does make a good accompanying feature), it’s also a very nineties comedy film touching upon modern alienation and the value of manhood in a cerebral urban environment—seeing characters abruptly thrust into a different context is always good for a few laughs. The ending is a bit pat in the way it resorts to familiar action-movie theatrics as a shortcut to self-actualization, but that’s the way these things go: City Slickers is meant to entertain, not radically question our assumptions. It succeeds at what it tries to do.