Tim-230

Let me begin by pointing out that IMDb makes a mistake when it lists Nell Roberts as "Woman in Bar Talking to George." The woman in the bar is George's girlfriend Ann, played by Molly McCarthy. Nell Roberts is the Salvation Army woman who appears in three places in the film but who speaks only at the end when she tells a cop, "Don't go in. They're robbing the bank." I speak from authority as the great-nephew of Nell Roberts, my grandmother's sister, who was active in community theater in St. Louis in the 1950s, and who also had a bit role (as an old woman who answers the door) in the film, "Hoodlum Priest" (starring Don Murray), which was also made in St. Louis. We always knew her as "Aunt Nelly," so I guess "Nell" was her stage name.

In any case, "The Great St. Louis Bank Robbery" is an interesting little movie -- though there really is nothing "great" about it. The noir approach fits the story line perfectly, but the execution strikes me as stiff and amateurish, especially in the acting and the editing. McQueen was doing what he could to be Brando, but Brando he wasn't. The three other members of the gang and the girlfriend have various small strengths as actors to commend them, but they wouldn't have been enough for professional survival today. The plethora of extras and bit players must have saved the producers some dinero, and they do give the film a certain documentary and amateur-theatrical charm, but their performances (including Aunt Nelly's) are of a type to make the viewer uncomfortable in the expectation of an embarrassing gaff. The homosexual subtext (mentioned by other reviewers) is certainly not imaginary. In fact, the things that make this movie most worth watching are, first, that homosexuality is included as a theme at all -- it was not necessary to the film's integrity unless the producers were aiming at some politically incorrect social commentary or had a personal ax to grind -- and, second, that the gay relationships had to be coded to make the finished work acceptable to the public in the late 1950s.

But I did enjoy the look of the cars and the streets of St. Louis (a la New York in "The Naked City") before the rapid urban disintegration that overtook it shortly afterwards, and from which it has still not recovered. The was the REAL "St. Louis Bank Robbery."

I enjoyed this film. I enjoyed its originality of execution, as well as its thematic obsession with originality itself. I also enjoyed the performances. But one thing that bothered me, and no one else seems to have noticed, is its resemblance to Sam Shepherd's "True West," the 1980 stage play, turned into a 1984 TV production starring Gary Sinise and, ironically, John Malkovich who also appears briefly in this film (though, in a sense, in his own eponymous film, of which he weirdly plays the director).

In both "Adaptation" and "True West" the story line involves two brothers, the first a successful screen writer embarked on a new project but now suffering from a debilitating case of writer's block, and the second, recently arrived for a stay with the first, who eventually begins working on a screenplay of his own, finishing it with the grudging help of his brother.

Even though the second brother's script sounds ridiculous and hackneyed to our ears and to those of the first brother, it is generously praised by a third party who represents the film industry's ignorant bureaucracy (the producer in "True West," the young studio boss in "Adaptation"), who both suggest that the second, greenhorn brother should now help the first. In both films the second brother becomes a kind of "doppelganger" of the first, a Mr. Hyde to the latter's Dr. Jekyll, and so it is not difficult to view these men as two sides of the same personality, which in "Adaptation" is one of the plot devices of second-brother Donald's script. All the major characters are in essence the same person because, although they may exist in the larger reality, they are all constructions (and reductions) of the author, including "Charlie" himself. And so we are to conclude that all writing is autobiographical (as much as we try to make it something else, something more), and the act of story-telling (i.e., movie-making) becomes a solipsistic enterprise shrinking the world into something that reflects nothing more than one's own neurotic self.

In neither film does it come as a surprise that reality begins to parody the written script, which has never been anything more than an insufficiently digested version of a richer, more elusive Reality (like the rare ghost orchid). This is underscored in "Adaptation" when the story ends so artificially and so happily, in all its Hollywoodian glory, contrary to all the all the events and all the agony that have led to it, including the ruination of the career of a fictionalized Susan Orlean and the deaths of both a fictionalized Donald and a fictionalized Laroche, the orchid man. Laroche is attacked by an alligator at just the right moment, a "deus ex machina" if there ever was one; and this, of course, is a slap in the face of the tormented ex-screenwriter McKee, but it is also a vindication of him because it helps us see how Charlie has sold out to the "formula." We notice this also in Valerie and Charlie's mutual confession of love, tidy and cute from a screenwriter's perspective, but too unbelievably pat from ours. These incidents can only make sense if we view all the trashed and co-opted characters as shriveled parts of Charlie's personality, whom he will now conveniently dispense with, just as Donald might have done, in order to get on with his comfortable career. In "True West," Austin, the bother who is equivalent to Charlie in "Adaptation," at one point laments, "There's nothin' real down here! Least of all me!" --an understandable observation when, although neither nature nor the human personality operates according to uniformly predictable laws, the characters in a Hollywood movie sometimes do. Charlie Kaufman could just as well have said this. But, in attempting to control the uncontrollable by putting himself in his own story, the "Charlie" he lets us see becomes as phony as everything else.

Like "Being John Malkovich," this is a movie that made me think -- maybe even more than "True West" did. I just wonder, though, whether Shepherd shouldn't sue for plagiarism.

This early (if not first) Merchant-Ivory collaboration anticipates what the team was later able to do with larger budgets and color cinematography. Set in post-independence India, it tells the story of a small, though thoroughly professional traveling Shakespeare company fallen on hard times. The troop, built on the talents of the three Buckingham family members, including the young and fetching daughter Lizzie, is slowly dissolving in a culture increasingly hostile to their art and readier to worship the queens of the silly Indian pop cinema.

The main thread of the plot concerns a rather thin romance between Lizzie and a young Indian playboy quite under the thumb of a local movie vixen named Manula. Meanwhile we are given snippets from various Shakespeare plays: Hamlet, Othello, Twelfth Night, Romeo and Juliet, Antony and Cleopatra.

Fine B&W photography, though much in this film seems dated now.