Hot damn! We saw finally saw Hal Ashby’s less revered, not-as-well- seen 1970 film “The Landlord,” last night at BAM’s AfroPunk film festival (no thanks to the useless publicists, mind you). It’s not readily available on DVD, we’ve been trying to see it for years, and we’ve unfortunately missed all the New York repertory screenings over the least few years (the last time being Sept 2007 at the Film Forum).
Goddamn it was good! Hal Ashby’s unassailable run of remarkable 1970s films is generally accepted as running from 1971’s “Harold And Maude” through 1979’s “Being There”(including everything in between). This overview of his work says the film is not a “major Hal Ashby film,” and man, we couldn’t disagree more! The case must be made for “The Landlord,” his debut feature as a director, to be included here (and surely we’re not the first to say this, but the consensus appears to be otherwise).
A funny, sharp and incisive look at racism, white guilt and miscegenation, the film stars Beau Bridges in perhaps his finest performance ever as a privileged and affluent New Yorker, who tries to strike out on his own far away from his WASPY-wealthy family by buying a brownstone in Brooklyn’s Park Slope neighborhood, which he plans to soup up luxury style once he’s kicked out all the inner-city planning tenants (the film also stars the great Lee Grant in a delicious performance as Bridge’s overbearing mother, and Lou Gosset Jr. as an unhinged and deservedly jealous tenant).
Insensitive, racially clueless, but compassionate, the landlord soon finds this task much more difficult than he initially perceived as he becomes deeply involved in his tenants lives seeing them as real people with real struggles. He even becomes romantically involved and soon he finds himself as an out-of-place white guy juggling two relationships with African-American women.
The very humanistic film veers from comedy, to social commentary, to near farce, to painful ugly and dramatic truths and has the Ashby-bent for not delivering easy answers, not to mention and incredibly inventive intercutting editing style and some super creative photography. The pedigree around this film is fantastic too. Norman Jewison produced it, Academy Award-nominated “Prince of Darkness” cinematographer Gordon Willis lensed it (“The Godfather,” many a classic Woody Allen film), Bob Dylan’s old keyboardist Al Kooper wrote the score and the movie also features some amazing, amazing soul cuts by Lorraine Ellison and the Staple Sisters. This thing has to come to DVD (hello, Criterion?)
This all dovetails nicely with this excellent Goodmagazine feature on Hal Ashby where a bunch of influential filmmakers, Wes Anderson, Judd Apatow, Alexander Payne, Jason Schwartzman and David O. Rusell comment on the fuzz-face genial director’s grand ’70s oeuvre. We thought we’d show some highlights since we adore all these films too.
Wes Anderson on “The Last Detail”
Anderson says a lot of the wandering “The Darjeeling Limited” ‘plot’ was inspired by Ashby’s wandering, cuss-filled sailor’s-at-port chronicle starring Jack Nicholson. “We were getting ready to make a movie about three sort of confused boys on a train, and ‘Detail’ follows more or less the same lines. Not to say that we stole our whole idea from it, but it crossed our minds. Also, this movie is always captivating, but it does not have a terrific plot, and maybe it might not have one at all—and that was encouraging to us because we didn’t have one either.
Judd Apatow on “Being There”
Apatow said the movie about an idiot savante turned political insider and adviser to a millionaire is “Hilarious, insightful, mysterious. I wish it inspired me to want to write that well, but it just inspires me to consider another career. It’s as if you were a member of Soft Cell and someone played you U2 for the first time. You would have to give up. Like a great Bob Dylan song, the meaning of this film is hard to discern. It definitely sends up the rich and powerful who rule this country. But the film can be read in any number of ways, all of which might be correct.”
Jason Schwartzman on “Harold And Maude”
Schwartzman says when he was cast in “Rushmore,” his mother suggested watching this December-May romance story between a free-spirited grandmother and an obsessed with death teenager (Bud Cort). “For the first time, a film made me feel the way music always had. When two strings on a guitar are out of tune, they vibrate very quickly. And as the strings become more in tune, the vibration changes, it slows, and you can actually feel them become in tune. “
David O. Russell on “Shampoo.”
O. Russell says the sexual politics flick about a Lothario hairdresser (Warren Beatty) becoming ironically undone on the eve of a 1968 presidential election reflected what life was like at the time. “The film opens in the dark, as soft strains of the Beach Boys’ ‘Wouldn’t It Be Nice,’ which will also end the film, trickle in with the sounds of Lee Grant and Warren Beatty getting it on. But we can’t see them; we can only hear them. Set in 1968, Shampoo is the quintessence of what the world felt like to me in 1975: loose, a little lost, a bit sweet, naïve, sincere. It’s America, brimming with candy and possibilities, though we might still fuck it up.”
Alexander Payne on “The Landlord”
As Payne notes, Norman Jewison had originally developed the film for himself, but then became busy and gave it to Ashby, a former film editor, for his debut. “It contains all the gentleness, eccentric rhythms, oddball humor, brilliant editing, and deep humanism that mark his other films, and like his other films, it’s utterly unique. Its look influenced ‘Sideways’ more than any other film.”
Payne nails its loopy charms far better than we could. He’s spot-on. “The Landlord” rules, I think I like it even better than “Shampoo,” it’s that good. Criterion Collection or someone, we beseech you.
Lorraine Ellison – “Stay With Me” from “The Landlord”