CANDY MOUNTAIN A
Switzerland
Canada France (91 mi)
1988 d: Robert Frank co-director: Rudy Wurlitzer
Once more before I go,
out to Killarney
Once more before I go, beg me to stay
As the wind blows across my grave, I will be calling
Once more before I go, once more for ever more
Once more before I go, beg me to stay
As the wind blows across my grave, I will be calling
Once more before I go, once more for ever more
—“Once More Before I Go,” by Al Silk (Tom Waits)
From the depths of the archives of the Museum of Fine Arts
in Houston, who allegedly hold copies of Robert Frank’s entire cinematic
output, comes yet another undiscovered gem, and while it was made in the late
80’s, remains one of the best films to effortlessly express the complexities
and ambiguities of the 50’s and 60’s, refusing to be defined or labeled,
searching through unchartered waters for that inexpressible meaning in life,
whatever and wherever that may be, taking all circuitous detours on the road,
living off the grid, studying everything around you, while living in the gray
matter of your young and all too impressionable mind. Perhaps what ultimately matters in this film
is that Frank was a recognized artist before he became a filmmaker, so an
artist’s sensibility runs throughout the picture. Knowing the personality of the foreign-born
director adds to a greater understanding of his works, as like many migrants
before him, he arrived in this country filled with hope and optimism, where he
was first and foremost a photographer, remaining fascinated with American
culture, but his views changed, where the optimism of the 50’s led to a
disparity in wealth and unmistakable realities of class and racial differences,
finally viewing the country as an often bleak and lonely place. He met key figures of the Beat Generation in
the late 50’s, including Jack Kerouac and Allen Ginsberg, making his first impromptu
movie with them called PULL MY DAISY (1959), which was written and narrated by
Kerouac, based on a play by Kerouac and featured the beat poets Allen Ginsberg,
Gregory Corso, Peter Orlovsky, as well as painter Larry Rivers and actress
Delphine Seyrig, made a year after he published his most
famous work, The Americans, a
collection of photographs that could be described as a prototypical road movie with
Kerouac writing the introductory text. Sean
O’Hagan writes from The Guardian, November
7, 2014, "Robert
Frank at 90: the photographer who revealed America won't look back":
Frank was 31 in 1955 when he
secured the Guggenheim Grant that financed his various road trips across
America the following year with his wife and his two young children in tow. He shot around 28,000 pictures. When Les Americains was
published by Robert Delpire in France in 1958, it consisted of just 83
black and white images, but it changed the nature of photography, what it could
say and how it could say it. Published
in the United Sates
as The Americans by Grove Press a year later, it remains perhaps the most
influential photography book of the 20th century. […]
Frank’s America is a place of
shadows, real and metaphorical. His Americans look furtive, lonely,
suspicious. He caught what Diane
Arbus called the “hollowness” at the heart of many American lives, the
chasm between the American dream and the everyday reality. With his handheld camera, Frank embraced
movement and tilt and grain. Contemporary
critics reacted with a mixture of scorn and outrage, accusing him of being
anti-American as well as anti-photography. A review in Practical Photography dismissed the book’s “meaningless blur,
grain, muddy exposures, drunken horizons and general sloppiness.” The Americans
portrayed a place and a people that many Americans just could not, or did not
want to see: a sad, hard, divided country that seemed essentially melancholic
rather than heroic. As Jack Kerouac put it
in his famous introduction, Robert Frank “sucked a sad poem out of
America.”
Frank was an outsider by temperament
and design. Born and raised in Zurich,
where he trained as a commercial studio photographer, he fled his solidly
bourgeois family in 1947, tired of “the smallness of Switzerland.” In New York, he landed a job at Harper’s Bazaar, where famed art director,
Alexey Brodivitch,
had hired the likes of Cartier-Bresson and Bill
Brandt, but deadlines and the dictates of magazine work quickly wore him
down and he set off for South America, shooting in the towns and villages of
Bolivia and Peru and living hand to mouth.
These journeys set the tone for
much of what was to follow as Frank traveled through England and Wales before
embarking on his road trips across America. Though he rejected Walker Evan’s more formal
approach, he learned much from the older photographer, whom he accompanied on
shorter trips after they met and became friends in New York. Their differing attitudes to photography – and
to life – were essentially generational: the impeccably well-bred Evans once
asked Frank, “Why do you hang out with those people, Robert? They have no class.” He was referring to Kerouac and Allen Ginsberg, whom Frank had
recognised as fellow iconoclasts in search of another wilder America that
matched their outlaw imaginations.
Their influence would seep into
Frank’s later work like a virus: the freeform flow of
his fly-on-the-wall short films and the uncompromising diaristic style of
the infamous Cocksucker
Blues, a documentary about the Rolling Stones 1972 tour of America that
caught the boredom and dissolution of life on the road in a grainy verite style
that was way too revealing for the group. They sued to prevent its release and sent a
sheriff to his door to confiscate his copy of the film. Legend has it that Mick Jagger acknowledged
the film’s greatness but told Frank: “If it shows in America we’ll never be
allowed in the country again.”
Frank met screenwriter Rudy Wurlitzer in the 1960’s, as both
were living in Cape Breton in Nova Scotia, about as far from the all-consuming bright
lights of Los Angeles as they could possibly get, both living in the shadows to
survive, while also keeping in touch in New York’s Lower East Side, growing
more inspired by his work with Monte Hellman in Two-Lane
Blacktop (1971) and Sam Peckinpah’s last western, Pat
Garrett & Billy the Kid (1973), initially working together on the film
KEEP BUSY (1975), an absurdist glimpse at a group of artists in Cape Breton, and
ENERGY AND HOW TO GET IT (1981), a near 30-minute short funded by the
Corporation for Public Broadcasting, a documentary spoof about a lone engineer
who believes in free energy butting heads with an Energy Czar, played by
William S. Burroughs. The best fusion of
their talents, however, is this Canadian co-directed film, largely improvised
and open-ended, combining Frank’s abstract, narrative free artistic vision with
Wurlitzer’s cryptic dialogue in near apocalyptic road journeys to nowhere,
where on the DVD commentary track of Two-Lane
Blacktop, Wurlitzer is quoted as saying, “The horizon is everything that
the rear-view mirror isn’t. It’s the
unknown.” Despite its rambling style,
often feeling lost and incoherent, the film is one of the better extensions of
the 60’s counterculture, with plenty of autobiographical references, described
by critic Jonathan Rosenbaum (The
Countercultural Histories of Rudy Wurlitzer | Jonathan Rosenbaum) as “the
deliberate relinquishment of power, a key aim of 60’s counterculture, (and) represents
the closest thing in his work to utopia,” arguably resonating more deeply than Hopper’s
Easy
Rider (1969) and Bob Rafelson’s Five
Easy Pieces (1970), for instance, both de-glamorizations of Hollywood
culture, but considered standard-bearers and among the first counterculture
films to be viewed by a mass audience, while this film, made nearly twenty
years later, is nearly forgotten, sent to the trash heap, barely mentioned, if
not omitted from an actor’s resumé, and only available in an obscure European
Region 2 DVD format. While it continues
Wurlitzer’s meditations on the myths of the American frontier, it uses a music
format to do so, not just on the eclectic soundtrack, but in the use of interesting
glimpses of musical figures of the 70’s and 80’s who populate the film as actors,
all of whom share an undeniable artistic integrity and creativity, each
figuring prominently in the storyline, adding a special appeal, wry humor, and
a hint that their appearance brings an alternative universe (and subversive
meaning) into nearly every scene. With
so many singers and musicians appearing in the film, who may or may not have
been under contract at the time, one of the reasons the film may be so
endlessly lost in a legal quagmire of limited distribution is no one has
attempted to untangle the complicated rights issues involving the various
artists and their music, which is heard throughout, but largely uncredited, as
it’s incorporated into the overall narrative.
While the film is, in effect, a rejection of trendy American
culture, especially how musicians are literally owned by record labels and measured
by capitalist dollar signs, with death only increasing their value, as we
witnessed when a slew of iconic 60’s rockers (Brian Jones, Jimi Hendrix, Janis
Joplin, Jim Morrison, Keith Moon) died before their time, reduced to having
their names emblazoned on marketable merchandise, lost in a land with an overriding
obsession with money, where the film title is a fictional place mentioned in a
depression era song, The Big Rock Candy
Mountain, a hobo’s dream of paradise on earth, “where the jails are made of
tin / and you can walk right out again.”
Nonetheless we begin our journey on the mean streets of New York,
following the exploits of a dreamer protagonist throughout, a not so bright but
idealistic and ambitious young kid who wants to be a star, Julius Book,
Chicago-born Kevin J. O’Connor, who was stuck with the label of being the next
James Dean and is simply brilliant throughout, the son of a Chicago cop, more
recently seen in Paul Thomas Anderson’s There
Will Be Blood (2007) and The Master
(2012), and a recurring character in the TV-series Chicago P.D. (2014 to present), a stand-in for the pursuit of the
American Dream, as he dreams of breaking into the music business, but thinks
only of success and money. Initially, however,
after walking off his job, he can’t even get his guitar back from Mario (Joe
Strummer, punk icon of the Clash) and his strange cohort, Arto Lindsay (New
York no wave group DNA), who instead sends him on a non-paying gig with Keith
Burns (David Johansen, aka Buster Pointdexter of the New York Dolls), appearing
here with a group of musicians, including his drummer, Tony “Machine”
Krasinski, but Burns ridicules his playing ability during a band
rehearsal. Instead he picks up on
Burns’s obsession with Elmore Silk guitars, supposedly the finest handmade
guitars on the market, each worth more than $20,000, but made by a recluse who
has all but disappeared from sight, making his guitars even more valuable. Julius gets Burns’s attention by pretending
to know the man, claiming he can track him down and get him to sign an
agreement to sell Burns a few of his guitars. Julius, it turns out, lies through his teeth,
claiming experiences he doesn’t have, where mostly he’s a shiftless music
wannabe with coiffed hair and a black leather jacket, where he’s got the look
but not the talent. Yet with the stroke
of a pen, Julius hits the road, receiving wheels and an advance of $2000, where
the free-wheeling style of the film really kicks into gear, featuring the
ever-widening, open expanse of Swiss cinematographer Pio Corradi, whose credits
list 100 films, yet none are remotely recognizable, which only adds to the
film’s charming allure. While Frank’s
photographic eye captures the striking beauty of vast natural landscapes,
isolated roads, and lonely characters who haunt the texts of so many American
poems and songs, yet over the course of his journey, there are many who remind the
aimless Julius “the road ain’t what it used to be,” turning this into a kind of
anti-road movie, where Wurlitzer seems to be commenting on this generation,
which has been sold a bill of goods about freedom and the mystery of “the
road,” having heard about Kerouac or Easy Rider,
but never reading the book or seeing the movie, where instead they’re nearly
incapable of actually learning anything from the experience.
Early on, Julius is given a sage bit of advice from a
toothless truck driver (Rockets Redglare), “Life ain’t no candy mountain,”
before being bilked out of money. In an
amusing series of vignettes, Julius meets Al Silks (Tom Waits), Elmore’s upscale
brother, like a character out of a Buster Keaton movie, a rich man living in
opulence (“There are rooms in that house that I haven’t even been in,”) whose
advice to Julius, as he practices on a putting tee, is that “You should be
playing golf. You’re young. You should be playing A LOT of golf.” Both getting soundly drunk, Julius takes a
nap to the sounds of Waits gravel-filled voice, cozied up next to a piano
singing “Once More Before I Go,” Tom Waits in Candy Mountain
- YouTube (7:15). Interestingly, in
the same year as the film’s release, Waits released Frank’s Wild Years, the final in a trilogy of albums that included Swordfishtrombones and Rain Dogs, music that had absolutely
nothing to do with the 80’s music scene, instead enveloping the idea of
absolute freedom of creation, which lingers through the cracks as a prominent
theme of the film. When Julius wakes,
Silks offers him his 60’s T-Bird for half his cash, claiming Elmore is living
with his daughter, who in stark contrast, is living in a disreputable trailer
park. By the time Julius gets there, he
discovers Alice (Laurie Metcalf) lives with her paraplegic husband Henry (Dr.
John, who plays no music) in a wheelchair, both fighting like cats and dogs, with
Henry especially incensed to learn Elmore’s guitars are so valuable and he
missed out on an opportunity to make money on them, leaving him with nothing,
as instead they literally drove him out, and in no time we can see why, as they
are a hilarious picture of turmoil and constant dysfunction, Dr. John in Candy Mountain YouTube
(6:31), but take the T-Bird off his hands for a broken down VW Van and a
forwarding address in the remote hinterlands of Canada. The VW breaks down almost immediately, with
Julius trading it in, along with some cash, for a pickup truck that takes him
into the snowy landscapes of Canada. Running
throughout the film is a recurring motif involving automobiles, as every time
Julius arrives in a new place, he leaves in a different vehicle. Similarly, as he discovers people from
Elmore’s past, Julius is stripped of his cash and all material possessions, yet
inevitably stumbles forward on his quest for fame and fortune with his same ideals
intact, while remaining oblivious to his surroundings. None more apparent than a drunken encounter
that leads him into the hoosegow, as falling asleep at the wheel, he happened
to veer his car into the property of an extremely pious and sanctimonious Justice
of the Peace (Roberts Blossom) and his equally eccentric constable son (Leon
Redbone), and is unable to pay for the damages, spending days locked up in an
adjoining room of the house, Leon Redbone in Candy Mountain
YouTube (10:19), but eventually his freedom is celebrated with a spirited (and
drunken) father and son rendition of “On the Road to Nowhere.”
Easily the most poignant stop along the way is his visit to
Cornelia (Bulle Ogier, a French actress who’s worked with Rivette, Fassbinder, Chabrol,
and Buñuel), one of Elmore’s former loves, a moving sequence filled with a
haunting pathos, like a memory of a forgotten incident, where she couldn’t be
more graciously tender and accommodating, even inviting him into her bed,
informing him “Elmore wants to step off the edge of the map,” but Julius is
hell-bent on finding him. It’s only when
he appears to be at the end of the road that the film comes together, where
we’ve learned bits and pieces of information about Elmore along the way,
creating a near mythical status before he ever makes an appearance. While the film is oddly amusing throughout, it
perhaps shouldn’t surprise us that when he finally discovers Elmore’s home,
there’s a message written on a mirror in the living room, “You owe me one.” When Elmore (Harris Yulin) finally does show
up, located at the farthest point of Cape Breton, Julius thinks he’s hit the
jackpot, clueless to what’s taking place before his eyes, as Elmore actually
takes him under his wing before walking out the door, perhaps reminding him of
his own carefree youth, suggesting he stick around and soak up some of the
surroundings, “I say freedom doesn’t have much to do with the road, one way or
the other.” What this underlines is that
there is no secret to happiness, and the farther you run away in pursuit of
your authentic self, you’re no closer to finding it, as we soon learn Elmore
cuts his own deal with a mysterious Asian buyer (Koko Yamamoto), and as part of
the deal, destroys all his other guitars while pledging to never make another, enormously
jacking up the prices of his existing works, enough for him to live on comfortably
for the rest of his life, which turns out to be no problem for him at all, with
Julius strangely helping him burn his remaining inventory. In the end, perhaps stomping on earlier
dreams and promises made, the last vestiges of earlier hopes abandon us as we approach
our own mortality and even the best of us are prone to sell out. While the finality of it all is a bit
surreal, and somehow magical, viewers are treated to a magnificent performance
by Cape Breton’s First Lady of Song, Rita MacNeil singing “Everybody,” Rita MacNeil in Candy Mountain
YouTube (3:12), as authentic and big-hearted a voice as you’ll ever find, conveying
in one song a lifetime of honesty and sincerity, where she may as well
represent the true artistic inspiration of the film, what Julius keeps hoping
to find, but once again ignores. A celebration
of marginal characters and a moving evocation of poets, vagabonds, and loners,
the fleeting beauty of the brief musical interludes reminds us of their
significance in our lives, where this is a rare film that on one canvas captures
that rambunctious yet elusive spirit of freedom while also demonstrating a
unique flair for an appreciation of beauty.
Made on a limited budget for next to nothing, this is the real
thing.
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