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| Richard Thomas as smalltown cinephile Jimmy J. |
SEPTEMBER 30, 1955 (1977) - Scorpion Releasing/Kino Lorber Studio Classics (BD)
Quite probably the masterpiece of James Bridges' feature film career (THE CHINA SYNDROME, URBAN COWBOY), this autobiographical time capsule attends how the news of actor James Dean’s untimely passing at age 24 affects Jimmy J. (Richard Thomas) - a starstruck Arkansas college student - and his circle of friends, which includes a politely warring "good" girlfriend and "bad" girlfriend, a male roommate who's secretly in love with him, and a more down-to-earth, hormone-driven teenage couple. It's more than admiration that drives Jimmy J.; he sees unexpressed aspects of himself expressed through James Dean, whose death not only frees him of his inhibitions but also makes him aware of the brevity of life and the urgent need to break through any barrier that threatens to contain him. His intuitions, and those of his more darkly inclined girlfriend Billie Jean (Lisa Blount in a remarkable debut performance) lead the others on a compelling tour that takes them through spiritualism into morbidity and finally a truly transformative moment of horror. The cast of young talent includes a spirited mixture of familiar (Dennis Quaid, Tom Hulce, Dennis Christopher) and unfamiliar (Deborah Benson, Lisa Blount) faces among its new talent, and there are also effective turns by Susan Tyrell as the small town's loose woman and Collin Wilcox as the hero's conservative mother. (The collaborations between Wilcox and Bridges began with his teleplay for the classic ALFRED HITCHCOCK HOUR episode, "The Jar.")
This is a rare and deeply probing study not only of cinephilia but also how the moviegoing experience - as it developed as an art form, and especially as it dropped its early formalist traditions to embrace a greater realism postwar - began to affect and also transform people's lives. What befalls Jimmy J. is incomprehensible to most of the film's other characters, but for me - after so many years of writing eulogistic essays in response to the latest deaths in filmland - it’s almost like watching a film about the First Man. One can believe there was no one else like Jimmy J. on this particular date in 1955, though they were scattered and numerous under the decade's carpet of conformity. They, we, are everywhere now. Thomas' brave and engaging performance of a teenager involved in some degree of possession straddles his previous work in THE WALTONS and also his devil's advocate in LAST SUMMER.
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| One of the great character reveals in movies: Billie Jean (Lisa Blount) dresses as Vampira to commune with the late James Dean. |
The sequence in the graveyard reminds me of a time when, I, after seeing HAROLD AND MAUDE (not the first time for me) with a group of friends, we all left the theater feeling under a spell and deeply connected with the morbid Harold. There was some encouragement among us to go find a cemetery to visit, but it was a cold night and it didn't come to that. This was before this film was made, so nothing it proposed struck me as too outrageous - only all too understandable. The film was not the other AMERICAN GRAFFITI Universal hoped for; they did nothing to promote it and it did not do well at the box office, even though it was unwittingly perfectly timed to coincide with the pop cultural trauma brought about by the shocking death of Elvis Presley on August 16, 1977 - who was himself affected by Dean's death and can be seen working with some of his affectations in his earliest films. There are moments in the film when Richard Thomas seems to be channelling Elvis at least as much as Dean.
The film was photographed on location by the great Gordon Willis, and he provides it with dozens of impossibly rich individual shots that could sustain paragraphs of analysis and deconstruction. Occasionally, I got the feeling that Leonard Rosenman's soundtrack (which Nat Segaloff tells me is "an interpolation and refiguring of Rosenman's scores from EAST OF EDEN and REBEL WITHOUT A CAUSE) was overdone - too forcedly sentimental - but then I tried to imagine the performances as they might have played without its referential support and realized it was overreaching precisely to remain in caliber with the acting onscreen, to tease the viewer's emotions out onto the far end of the same limb. In a sense, it may be Rosenman's score that saves the picture; not that other departments of the film are in any way lacking, but without his music supporting the performances of Thomas, Blount, and Tyrell, I believe they might have come across as more deranged or artificial. The movie has a great moment when Tyrell says in a sudden outburst, "This is not a movie!" - and of course, it is; Rosenman's score has been reminding us of this all along.
This new Kino Lorber release is also accompanied by a nicely attentive reading/commentary by Bridges biographer Peter Tonguette. Without spoiling the particulars of the finale, I was surprised by the commentary’s viewpoint that Jimmy J. would doubtless go on to “become” the author of this autobiographical tale; it was my own reading that he was at least as well poised to fulfill his sacred pact with Dean by inviting an early death and becoming a myth to the friends he left in Arkansas. I can see it either way, and I'm glad I do; I prefer the ambiguity of choice to either certain interpretation and the film's closing shot makes an interesting point of comparison to the finale of GHOST WORLD (2001), one of my favorite films of the present century.
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