Flicker (20 page)

There were clearly a number of crude cuts in the print we had; we were sure whole scenes were missing, including the finish, where the dialogue seemed to have been hacked off in the middle of a sentence. Even so, what survived of the picture displayed remarkable sophistication. It must have slipped through the old Universal monster mill on the basis of its title alone. In a daring stroke, Clare decided to nominate it as possibly the first
film noir.
In those days, tracing the origins
of film noir
was a favorite game among movie scholars and critics, the cinematic equivalent of finding the source of the Nile among Victorian explorers. For the purposes of the festival, we decided to push that identity for most of the rest of Castle's movies, suggesting that, as ratty as many of them might be, they deserved to be recognized as among the earliest examples of
noir
, a genre that was usually dated from several years later and credited to more famous directors. We hoped that serving Castle's work up on that platter would lend a little academic class to the festival and perhaps make up for the obvious shoddiness of what we had to show. For despite Sharkey's best efforts to repair and restore, most of the films displayed abundant signs of wear and neglect: torn sprockets, breaks and burns that had never been patched; sound tracks that were often a blur of static, whines, and rumbles. There would have been no excuse for screening most of what we had to show if the
Judas
weren't there to provide a centerpiece. As Clare observed, it was a pity Castle's career didn't build up from
Judas
rather than down … and down and down from it.

By the time the Max Castle Film Festival arrived, I had, without realizing it, reached a state of euphoric expectation. This was, it suddenly occurred to me, the biggest project I'd taken on in my life, and I'd pursued it to a successful conclusion under the eye of a demanding mentor. It wouldn't have been Clare's style to lavish praise on her pupil's efforts; still, I could tell she was pleased with the result. Now my months of hard work would finally be crowned by five evenings of films featuring my own program notes. For the first time I had some idea of the gratification Clare must have found in running The Classic. The notes were, of course, carefully crafted to reflect as many of her views as possible. She'd sat through all the preview screenings tossing off remarks I knew she expected me to take down
verbatim. I did. But when I had finished shaping them for the mimeograph machine, she surprised me by insisting that I claim them for my own. That struck me as curious. Clare wasn't the one to give away her intellectual wares. Nor did she seem to be granting me title to her critical judgments in a spirit of generosity. Rather I had the sense that she wanted the event to appear as somebody else's idea—not hers. As much as anything, she was washing her hands of responsibility.

As the first night of the festival approached, I had no idea quite what to expect, but Clare accurately recognized that I was looking for more than a week's worth of old movies at a hole-in-the-wall art house was likely to yield. “Don't get your hopes up, Jonny,” she warned. “If we're lucky, we'll sell a dozen tickets.”

We did better than that with
Judas.
Billed as a significant discovery, it drew a capacity Sunday evening audience. After that, we went begging. A double bill of
The Ripper Strikes
and
Axis Agent,
Castle's earliest and latest Hollywood films of the sound era, drew all of nine customers, only three of whom stayed through the second feature after watching the jumpy, dimly lit, nearly inaudible first. The following night was worse, bad enough to make me feel ill.
Man into Monster
and
Shadows over Sing Sing
brought us an audience of six. The closest we came to an expression of appreciation was to have one of our Classic regulars stop by afterward to remark, “I wondered why you were showing this old crud.”

“Did you really think it would be crud?” Clare asked defensively.

“Of course.”

“And now what do you think?”

“It's crud all right. But I can see what you're getting at in the notes. The shadows. It's all in the shadows, isn't it? Weird. It's going to give me bad dreams.”

“Oh? Why?”

“Because somehow I think I know what it would be like to be on death row. Creepy. Especially since, like it says in the notes, the movie never tells you what the prisoner is condemned for. It's the best part I ever saw Tom Neal do.”

The fellow had seen exactly what we had wanted him to see. Or rather what Clare wanted him to see; I'd simply taken the notes from her by dictation. She compared the camera work in
Shadows over Sing Sing
with Caravaggio, whose canvases can get so dark they give you eyestrain. But you keep staring, thinking there's something there
you don't want to miss. “Caravaggio painting a Dick Tracy comic strip,” was how Clare put it.

The next night brought us a nearly full house for
Count Lazarus
and
Kiss of the Vampire.
They were old horror clunkers that had a certain nostalgic appeal. People remembered them from childhood matinees or “Creature Features” television. The turnout perked up my spirits, at least until the first movie got rolling. At that point, something happened that nearly turned the evening into a disaster, a jarring disruption which was destined to give our makeshift festival an importance we could never have foreseen.

It began with a big, blowsy woman rushing in five minutes after
Count Lazarus
had started. She wore a howling flower-pattern dress pulled skin tight at the bust and bustle. Her hair was whipped up into a towering bouffant, bleached so white it might have glowed in the dark. She came in asking for help. Asking, then demanding, in a high, whining voice that sounded like a bad imitation of Shirley Temple pleading with Captain January. The more demanding she got, the more thrusting her abundant bosom became. Finally, Clare and I followed where she led. Outside, waiting at the top of the little flight of stairs that led down from the alley, sat a cadaverous old man who looked like a pile of bones stacked up in a wheelchair. Pale and drawn, he couldn't have weighed more than a ten-year-old boy, but his size was not entirely due to wastage. After a moment, I recognized that he was a dwarf; his legs barely made it over the front edge of the chair. He was wheezing so hard between hard drags on his cigarette that I couldn't hear a word he said. When I did, it turned out to be a muffled stream of abuse and curses. “What the hell is this?” he was asking. “A goddam tomb? A movie house in a basement! What the bejesus is goin' on here?”

Standing behind the old guy's chair was an even older-looking Japanese wearing a rumpled chauffeur's uniform. Between the lines that marked his face an expression of infinite exhaustion showed through. It was a muggy summer night; even so, the man in the chair kept a blanket wrapped tightly around himself and was still shivering under it, probably more with palsy than cold. He was wearing a zany porkpie hat that rested hard on his ears, pushing them out like small pink wings. The face between the ears had the look of a starved bird; it was one nasty collection of scowls and wrinkles from brow to chin. The cigarette screwed into the corner of his mouth seemed to be a permanent fixture.

With the old man wheezing and muttering all the way, the four of us—Clare, the woman, the Japanese chauffeur, and myself doing most of the work—levered the chair down the steps and into what passed for the lobby of The Classic, receiving no thank-you for our efforts. Crouching and lifting beside the old guy, I noticed the needlethin plastic tubes that ran along his cheeks and up into his nostrils; they stemmed from the oxygen packet strapped to the chair, which was measuring out the whiffs and sniffs of air that kept his lungs supplied. The packet made a tiny gasping sound each time it pumped.

When Clare told the woman that the movie had already started, the old guy croaked, “I won't pay full price, not for half a picture.”

“You missed the first five minutes, that's all,” Clare said.

“Beginning's the best part,” the old man retorted. “Don't pay full price,” he instructed the woman. Two trembling hands poked out of the blanket and began struggling to replace the burned-down cigarette with a new one. The Japanese chauffeur supplied it and gave it a light. “Knock off a quarter, fifty cents, you hear?”

“Oh Christ!” Clare muttered, knowing that his raspy voice was getting loud enough to carry into the theater. “I'll let both of you in on one ticket. Satisfied?”

“Him, too,” the old guy insisted, pointing to the chauffeur. “My bodyguard. Never budge without him.”

“Okay, okay,” Clare agreed. “But no smoking.”

“You ain't got a smoking section?” the old man asked with an astonished stare.

“The smoking section is in the alley—where you just were.”

“Shit! What kinda movie theater is this?”

“A small, dumpy one with lousy ventilation. If you don't like it, please leave.”

Muttering, he sucked in a lungful of smoke and swallowed it forever before the chauffeur removed and discarded the cigarette. The woman paid for the single ticket and then awkwardly maneuvered the wheelchair through the curtained entrance of the theater.

That was the last we heard from the latecomers until the film ended—except for the old guy's steady coughing and rasping. When the screen finally went dark, he let out a hoot of derision. “Pigs!” he growled in a sandpaper falsetto. “Blood-suckin' pigs! You call that showin' movies? That's garbage. Phooey!” The woman got him back into the lobby, where he riveted Clare with a stare of icy contempt. “That ain't Max Castle you're showin'. Whatja do, run the movie
through a meat grinder? You got no respect, you hear? Goddam vandals! I'm slappin' an injunction on this flea pit first thing in the mornin'. I'm puttin' you outa business.”

The old guy chewed off his accusation in a venomously stinging Brooklynese, spitting the words out the side of his face that wasn't clamped down on the unlit cigarette. He was now shaking with enough rage to fall out of his chair. The woman steadied him while the chauffeur put a match to the much-chewed butt. He quieted down long enough to take a life-saving drag, then broke down in a cascade of coughing.

Clare fished the cost of admission out of the till and was eagerly refunding it to the woman with a not-too-polite request that they leave.

“Nothin' doin', sister,” the old guy insisted. “You ain't buyin' me off. I'm puttin' you outa business, I mean it. You can't make corned-beef hash outa my work an' get away with it.”

“
Your
work?” Clare was stymied by the remark.

“Me and Max. Like that.” He held out two bony intertwined fingers. “The man was a genius. You're tearin' the heart outta him in there. I ain't gonna let you do it.”

Clare eyed him narrowly, suddenly cooling her anger. “Who are you?” she asked.

“Lipsky,” the old man shot back. “A lot that's gonna mean to you.”

“Arnold
Lipsky?”

The old man went silent, staring back at her in amazement. “Yeah, that's it.”

“
Zip
Lipsky?”

“Right.”

“Glory Road? Johnny Champion? Symphony of a Million?”

The old guy's etched-in scowl began to melt. Not much, but enough to allow a hint of suspicious surprise show through. His lips went soft, letting the cigarette drop into the folds of his blanket. The chauffeur went searching for it, found it, and repositioned it in his mouth.

“You know me?” he asked.

“One of the three best cinematographers there ever were.”

“Yeah?” His eyes gave an aggressively inquisitive squint. “Who's the other two, I'd like to know?”

Quick as a wink, Clare answered, “Tissé … and Freund.”

“Right about Freund,” the old man agreed. “The guy never made
a bad shot. He learned a lot from Max, I'll bet you didn't know that. But
wrong
about Tissé.”

“He taught Eisenstein everything he knew,” Clare came back, challenging him.

“An' that was too bad for Eisenstein. Tissé—he could be tricky, but he couldn't be real. Stagey. He was stagey. You gotta be tricky
and
real.”

“All right,” Clare went on, now showing clear signs of high enjoyment. “What about … Georges Périnal?”

The old guy stared at her incredulously.

“Blood of a Poet”
Clare added as if he might not recognize the name.

“Yeah, yeah, I know. Jesus, is that your idea of good shootin', that kinda French artsy-fartsy?”

“Okay, then. Sven Nyquist.”

“Whatsa matter? You afraid to name any Americans?”

“Billy Bitzer.”

“That's better. But, come on, that's Stone Age stuff. In them days, every time a guy picked up a camera, he invented somethin'. Besides, you can't tell what's him and what's Griffith.”

“What about Jim Howe, then?”

“You think Howe was better'n me?” A hurt whine came into his voice.

“Well, he was pretty damn good.”

“Good, sure. But better?”

Clare thought it over. “No, not better.”

“Damn right.”

She tried again. “Elgin Lessley?”

“Now you're talkin'. Lessley—that's real moviemakin'. Keaton woulda been lost without him. Trouble was: Elgin was a big nothin' with lights. Comedy don't let you do nothin' with lights. You gotta show all the details, see. Keep it square and bright.”

As if she were playing a trump card, Clare said, “You want lights too? Okay. Gregg Toland.”

Nodding thoughtfully, the old guy pondered the name with obvious respect. Almost wistfully, he said, “Yeah, yeah. Jesus, he was really somethin'. That deep-focus stuff—really gorgeous. Specially in
Grapsa Wrath.
That was his ‘best. Better'n
Citizen Kane,
if you wanna know. Okay, you got me there.”