In the Latest Shards from the Fractured Mirror, I Cover The George Raft Story, Hardcore, My Geisha, The Stand-In and The Wager
For the last year or so much of my time and energy has been devoted to working on The Fractured Mirror, my upcoming book about movies about the movie business. I’ve posted much longer versions of some of the pieces that I’ve written for the book on this website but the vast majority I only shared with people who pre-ordered the book through Kickstarter and Backerkit or who donate to this site’s Patreon page.
I’m quite proud of the work I’ve done on the book, as well as the kooky assortment of movies I’ve covered so I figured that every month I would share a handful of pieces I’ve written for The Fractured Mirror with y’all. I’ve written up 385 movies so far and will cover god knows how many in total so I am very open to recommendations on movies to write about.
In conclusion, please donate to my site’s Patreon page or pre-order The Fractured Mirror over at Backerkit. I desperately need the income and I’d love to share these new pieces with as many people as possible.
The George Raft Story (1961) FM
George Raft was as famous, or rather infamous, for the questionable company that he kept as much as the roles the roles that he played. The dancer turned tough guy actor’s career both benefitted and suffered from the widespread, perhaps not incorrect, assumption that he was convincing playing gangsters because he was a small time hood himself, particularly in his younger days, who hung out with other hoods and low-life criminals.
The glossy, black and white 1962 biopic The George Raft Story does nothing to discourage the idea that its handsome subject was both an actor who played gangsters and a gangster himself, or at least gangster-adjacent.
But if Raft (Ray Danton) was a brute he was a beauty as well. The film opens with Raft working as a dancer who rents his time, youth, beauty and slick moves to lonely women eager to have him all to themselves, if only for a few minutes.
Raft’s fancy feet are his entryway into show business but his slick mouth and fists get him into trouble with powerful gangsters. So he heads to Hollywood to make it in the motion picture business and finds consistent work playing the kinds of hoods who populate his social circle.
The George Raft Story is a lot like its subject: gorgeous, tough, light on its feet and entertaining, albeit in a superficial way. Danton plays Raft as a man’s man, a lady’s man and a renaissance man who is a tough guy first, a dancer second and an actor third.
If The George Raft Story is highly fictionalized trash, the kind of hokum where the hero’s mother gets a Christian burial despite being Jewish, it’s at least energetic, exuberant, highly caffeinated garbage. It may not be art but it is an awful lot of old-fashioned fun.
Hardcore (1979) FM
Three years after 1976’s Taxi Driver, screenwriter Paul Schrader, cinematographer Michael Chapman and actor Peter Boyle reunited for 1979’s Hardcore, another mesmerizing plunge into sexual exploitation and the depths of human depravity. This time the seedy milieu is not New York at its neon sleaziest but rather the Los Angeles porn scene of the late 1970s. Writer-director Schrader depicts it less as an industry than as a circle of hell filled with lost souls and misery masquerading as sexual ecstasy.
A blisteringly intense George C. Scott delivers a volcanic performance as Jake Van Dorn, a ramrod straight Calvinist businessman in Grand Rapids, Michigan, the very image of sober Midwestern propriety. When his teenage daughter Kristen (Ilah Davis) disappears into the West Coast sex underworld the distraught dad hires sleazy gumshoe Andy Mast (Peter Boyle) to find her but when he comes up empty the man of God descends into a contemporary Sodom and Gomorrah to look for her himself. In his quest to save his daughter he recruits the services of cynical sex worker Niki (Season Hubley) as he explores a world beyond his comprehension.
Hardcore is full of inherently comic situations played straight. Schrader seems oddly oblivious to the infinite comic possibilities of a stiff, Godly Michigan man whose understanding of sex seems limited to fuzzy memories of joyless missionary sex with the wife solely for the sake of procreation going undercover as a porn producer with a ridiculous wig, fake mustache, gold chain and tie dyed tee shirt but the same rigid personality and fatherly cadences of his buttoned-up real life.
The culture clash laughs that Hardcore nevertheless engenders seem to be of the accidental variety. Hardcore is weirdly non-self-aware but the camp and unintentionally comic elements don’t compromise its hypnotic seediness or the raw power of Scott’s performance.
Hardcore is a strange, unwieldy character study with a disappointingly pat anti-climax of an ending but it’s also a riveting look at Schrader’s pet obsessions and a fascinating sociological document of the West Coast porn scene during a time of transition.
My Geisha (1962)
Some movies accidentally trip on a landmine of racial insensitivity. The astonishing 1962 comedy My Geisha instead giddily detonates hydrogen bombs of old school racism every ten minutes or so. It doesn’t just involve a white character pretending to be Asian; that’s its entire plot. Given its premise, it’s surprising that My Geisha was released in 1962 instead of 1932.
In a bewilderingly misguided performance Shirley MacLaine, who will have to answer for her crimes here when she meets her maker, plays Lucy Dell, an American movie star famous for her light comedy collaborations with director husband Paul Robaix (Yves Montand).
Lucy is Paul’s leading lady onscreen and off. When he informs her that he will be traveling to Japan to make a big-screen adaptation of Madame Butterfly she assumes that she’ll once again be his star.
In a fit of basic dignity Paul tells his wife that it would be wildly offensive to cast a red-haired, blue-eyed white woman as a Japanese geisha. The headstrong top box-office attraction unfortunately takes the rejection as a challenge.
So she flies to Japan and pretends to be shy Japanese geisha Yoko Mori. Being the world’s two biggest, most gullible idiots, neither Paul nor his hot to trot leading man Bob Moore (Bob Cummings) realize that Yoko is Lucy in disguises.
Lucy’s oblivious husband is so impressed by the fake Japanese woman’s authenticity that he offers her the lead role in Madame Butterfly despite “Yoko” not even being an actress.
What follows is essentially Yellow Face: The Movie as MacLaine performs a crude burlesque of delicate Japanese femininity. My Geisha was filmed on location in Japan, which somehow just makes everything worse. Why did the filmmakers have to rope the Japanese people into this nonsense? My Geisha merits a place of shame high in the pantheon of egregiously racist boondoggles alongside Soul Man and Mickey Rooney in Breakfast at Tiffany’s. My Geisha isn’t just very, very wrong: it possesses Loqueesha levels of racism.
The Stand-In (2020)
Drew Barrymore rocketed to superstardom as a small child and bottomed out while barely in her teens. That should make the E.T star the perfect choice to play Candy Black, a self-destructive, cocaine-addicted movie star whose once thriving career cratered due to an exceedingly public meltdown in the 2020 comedy-drama The Stand-In. Barrymore finds the humanity in a show business monster who only becomes a decent human being while out of the spotlight but the misconceived show-business satire is beyond redemption.
The Stand-In opens with Candy bottoming out. She’s a big box office attraction thanks to a slew of idiotic yet lucrative lowbrow comedies yet she hates herself, her career and show-business and becomes a veritable recluse after attacking a costar on set.
When Candy is sentenced to ninety days of rehab she hires her lookalike stand-in Paula (also Barrymore) to do her time for her. Paula, alas, only appears to be a harmless doofus. She discovers that she likes being a famous movie star, even of the disgraced variety, a whole lot more than she does being a complete unknown so she decides to steal a life and career Candy no longer wants.
After leaving rehab Paula begins doing public appearances as Candy, who has no interest in re-engaging with a world and an industry that has only brought her pain.
The furtively malevolent usurper takes over Candy’s personal and professional life by stealing her woodworker boyfriend and launching an apology tour that wins “Candy” back her fans and her career.
Finally!
The premise is rich with comic and dramatic possibilities that The Stand-In does not realize. Sam Bain’s screenplay is a tonal train wreck that alternates between curdled, misanthropic dark comedy that’s never funny and painfully earnest drama. The Stand-In wastes a clever idea and a game star by being needlessly complicated and convoluted yet also strangely devoid of empathy.
The Wager (2007)
There aren’t a lot of Christian movies about the film industry because bible-thumpers tend to view the secular movie business as a contemporary Sodom & Gomorrah, only more depraved. That makes the hilariously awful 2007 Christian drama The Wager an outlier. Its godly protagonist draws the line at making out with an actress who is not his wife yet he somehow manages to become a heavy favorite for an Academy Award for Best Actor despite clearly being the worst actor in the history of film.
Superstar country singer and sometimes actor Randy Travis tackles the impossible lead role of Michael Steele, an action movie star who is a heavy favorite to win the top prize in acting despite a clear-cut inability to emote.
The Christ-loving thespian is plagued by visions of God and the Devil battling for his soul and the words and ideas of the Sermon on the Mount. His faith is sorely tested when his wife leaves him, he’s kicked off the set of his new film for insulting the director and an evil paparazzi played by Doug Jones, in a rare human role, successfully frames the most pious man in show-business as a child molester after taking a picture of him with a child that is not his own.
Will the improbably acclaimed action hero with the hypnotically wooden presence fall apart as his world is progressively rent asunder or will he hold strong to his faith in Christ as everything that he knows and loves is taken from him?
The Wager gets everything about the film industry, and film, and human nature, egregiously wrong. It’s the kind of amateurish endeavor where a mega-star follows up an Oscar turn in a breakout prestige film with what appears to be a low-budget direct-to-streaming action movie he’s fired from. As an exploration of faith in the face of doubt and uncertainty this is predictably, inevitably hokey and heavy-handed but it’s even more hopeless in its fascinatingly off take on the movie business. Travis delivers an award-worthy performance here alright, but it’s a Golden Raspberry-level turn in a movie that’s every bit as dire, in no small part because it bewilderingly casts a non-actor as a great actor.
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