Gumshoe

[koganbot]

Wrote this comment about Stephen Frears's Gumshoe on a friend's locked thread (friend was comparing a whole set of '60s and early '70s films including this one to prog rock):

Gumshoe - terrific movie, and the only one of these I've seen - seems more punk than prog, actually, though not punk in a confrontational Stooges or Sex Pistols (or Mean Streets) manner; more like the Dolls, suffused with mourning for all the breakdowns of wild late-'60s promise, but reaching back earlier (Dolls to the girl groups, Gumshoe to the rockabillies, to Marlowe and Spade) for forms that give the promise a more mundane form, without giving up on it. The Finney character really does become the detective-story hero of his imagination, against a resolutely non-Hollywood backdrop. And in the tentative alliance near the end between Finney and the rival old detective-enforcer who'd been stalking him, Frears foreshadows the new cultural configurations he plays with later in Laundrette and Sammy and Rosie.

Surprised this movie hasn't gotten more attention, given the respect now accorded Stephen Frears. I remember Kael or Gilliatt in the New Yorker giving it a rave at the time, which is why I eventually saw it, which wasn't until sometime in the mid '70s, or even later*: Was part of a revival double feature with Billy Wilder's The Private Life Of Sherlock Holmes: I watched Gumshoe, then Private Life, then sat through Gumshoe again so that I could make more sense of the accents and lingo. Then saw it a third time several years later.

*[EDIT: Don't know the source of my uncertainty here. I'm sure I saw it the summer of 1975, part of weekly film showings at the Art Institute Of Chicago.]

Comments

[dubdobdee.livejournal.com]

I didn't have space in that piece -- or time while thinking about it -- to think through the division I was drawing, but I guess it was along these lines (which may not work; certainly needs work).

Prog involves a key dimension of taking the activity of fantasy seriously, as an element in your make-up that space must be allowed for: it's a formless realism* of the patchwork of our dreams, absurd or essential (because prog's dreams aren't all mimsy elves by any means). I'm taking punk to be a purification movement of demystifying anti-fantasy**, probably because I view it through the lens of Brit post-punk, which was all about the rhetoric of demystification; of treating fantasies as symptoms...

*But I need to say why I'm calling it a realism.
**Which in fact it isn't, taken expansively: if it includes the Electric Prunes or the Dolls or indeed the Clash***
***But this is NOT how I took it, as an ideologue caught up in it: these guys were NOT "real punk" to my mind, they were a hangover of what "we" must "overthrow". Dreams were just delusions; I was very nihilist!

[koganbot]

Well, remember that Bob Dylan was my Johnny Rotten - also that BritProg pretty much passed me by (except for Cream and Hendrix, and I definitely underrated them, and while they were categorized as "progressive rock" they generally weren't called "prog," were they?). I think of the punks as wild romantics, and I don't think of punk and psychedelia as being any kind of opposites: Paul Kantner's "We are leaving, you don't need us" and Lou Reed's "Choose to chose, choose to go" can walk arm in arm, even if one is a fantasy ship/space voyage and the other is a fantasy suicide threat. "Give a wrong time, stop a traffic line" feels plenty fantastic, a fantasy clearing of the ground. It doesn't seem that it's clearing the world of fantasy except to the extent that it's considering the social order to be a fantasy that doesn't know itself as such. In any event, punk is hardly a celebration of the ordinary, any more than psychedelia was. And psychedelia wasn't always a celebration of the future, either. In 1968 in "The House At Pooneil Corners" Marty Balin & crew had exploded the world and killed everyone in it and then announced "All the idiots have left."

If you take The What Thing as the classic Frank Kogan urpunk text - and note that though Dylan is my official urpunk, I was only just really diving into him then, had gotten Highway 61 Revisited only three weeks earlier, and was drawing much more heavily on the Airplane, and was also drawing on the Dead's American Beauty (also recently attained) and Aoxomoxoa, borrowed from my friend Hoppity, and the Merry Pranksters of The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test (which I'd also borrowed from Hoppity iirc), all good for the idea of everyday life as absurd but the everyday absurdity powerful enough to thwart dreams, so dreams crumbling to posturing bullshit in the face of absurd reality - then The What Thing (my 1970-71 punk thing) plays a double or triple role: it's a sense of dissatisfaction, a dimly or barely visualized sense of alternatives, or simply the need for an alternative, the reality of "love" etc. falling short of what the word promises, and as such The What Thing is a stance from which to call bullshit on the present, to call bullshit on "reality"; but it's also a clear-eyed calling of bullshit on the supposed alternatives - the freaks, for instance - as being any kind of real alternative ('cause different didn't feel so different, a point I'd surely have made had I heard Hilary Duff in January 1971).

Think of Dylan as a kid who'd reached to voices beyond himself - country blues, hillbilly, rockabilly - and taken on those voices as his own, in order to become something different; had also reached to language beyond himself (the French symbolists); but most crucially had demanded that he and people like him take responsibility for their own adventure, for their own reaching, rather than delegate their adventure to black people and working-class people and the rural poor and the "folk" and the poets etc. Shouldn't let other people get your kicks for you. So voice and language belong to the future, to the imagination, rather than being something one portrays accurately. But voice and language require you to put your vision into actual sound and actual words, where they risk being revealed as barren and boring.

Seen in this context, Johnny is another Dylan, which is to say that he took an American and Stones form and de-Americanized the voice, at least tried to, to make the adventure his own. I assume that your purification project was every bit as complicated.

[dubdobdee.livejournal.com]

I would imagine -- in the the UK -- that Cream were occasionally called "progressive blues" during their lifetime: I don't think the term "progressive rock" was used much before 1970-ish (and "prog" not till a lot later); be interesting to know. Jon Savage used to distinguish UK psychedelia and psych (which he approved, as a species of proto-punk) from prog, which he disliked: though they certainly blur into one another.

Bands like The Groundhogs and the Edgar Broughton band were (UK) proto-punk progressive blues bands; Zappa is US proto-prog, definitely. (I think the key element for it to be prog is classicaland/or jazz-type compositional material...)

[koganbot]

The FM rock stations I listened to between '69-'71 tended to call themselves "progressive radio" and what they played "progressive rock," though I'm not at all sure when they started using those terms. Cream were broken up by then, but they were central to what the stations were playing, so that's why I think of "progressive rock" as the broad term for the FM rock of those years, and Cream as central. So it wasn't just the stuff that led to art rock, it was the whole shebang, including Neil Young and the James Gang and the Who and proto-metal and Tull and "jazz"-rock like Blood Sweat & Tears and Chicago, not just the stuff that was playing around with "classical." I don't know how universal this was, or if it was just usage in Providence and New Haven. The later term "prog" tended to narrow "progressive" in retrospect, but I'm not sure what else to call these bands. They weren't simply "rock," a term that would have included Three Dog Night and the Doobie Brothers, for instance.