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koganbotWrote 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.]
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.]
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Date: 2010-05-25 04:47 pm (UTC)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.