Joel and Ethan Coen are such offbeat, unique filmmakers that it was surprising when they chose to make True Grit, a film in the Western genre, and to do so with a straight approach that respected the conventions of the genre and one that was both a literary adaptation and a remake of an earlier film (Charles Portis' novel, and Henry Hathaway's 1969 film version, respectively).
The Coens' film of True Grit is one of the best films of its decade, and one of the best films the Coens have made, though it is unlikely to go down as one of their best-remembered films, though that is only because it is so different in approach from the style of their most popular movies.
There is so much to praise in True Grit, from the impeccable design and period detail, to the startling maturity and emotional honesty of Hailee Steinfeld's performance, but in my estimation, two things really make it stand apart in a class by itself: the writing by the Coens, and the starring performance of Jeff Bridges as Rooster Cogburn. The 1969 film of True Grit provided the iconic John Wayne with one of his best roles, but Bridges manages to completely embody the character and make the role his own here.
The script is one of the best that the Coens have ever written, taking a sincere and straightforward approach to the material, the characters and dialogue imbued with honesty and poignancy without ever sliding into easy sentimentality or hitting a single false note. It's truly one of their finest achievements and, without exaggeration, one of the finest films yet made in the 21st century.
This is a frame from an early film by Alice Guy, titled "Bathing in a Stream", from 1897. I was watching this short actualitie subject the other day and was reminded of a comment made by film historian Richard Koszarski (in an interview included on the Edison: Invention of the Movies DVD collection). Koszarski says that, essentially, that these early film subjects were conceived as "moving pictures" in the truest sense; that they have to be understood in terms of the conventions and expectations of still photography of the time.
Koszarski's statement is central to thinking about these early film subjects as sophisticated, fully realized cinematic works in their own right. The framing of "Bathing in a Stream", for example, is so exquisite, the movement of the water flowing down toward the camera, the actions of the people moving throughout the frame, is all meticulously organized and displays an expert eye for detail and composition.
I had never heard of this 1969 comedy starring Jack Lemmon and Catherine Deneuve until last night, when I came across a DVD copy while browsing at the video store. I always enjoy Jack Lemmon, especially in his films from around this era, when he seemed to specialize in playing uptight middle-class white-collar types who undergo a personal transformation, often as a result of his relationship with a free-spirited type who opens him to new experiences. From the plot description, it was also clear that this would be one of those films from that transitional period in Hollywood when the movies were dealing with the changing times, new freedoms and permissiveness of the post-Production Code era. And the pairing of Lemmon with Catherine Deneuve was intriguing enough in itself for me to check it out.
The April Fools is steeped in late-60s New York chic. The film begins swiftly as Wall Street broker Howard Brubaker (Lemmon) is arriving at a big Manhattan office building to accept a new promotion. His boss (Peter Lawford) is in the process of throwing a big office party, filled with beautiful people. Lemmon awkwardly tries to ingratiate himself with the crowd, but things only start to pick up when he meets a young French woman, Catherine (Deneuve) -- who, unbeknownst to Lemmon, also happens to be the boss's wife. The two leave the party together and spend the night wandering around Manhattan, enjoy an evening with a freewheeling, funloving older married couple (Myrna Loy and Charles Boyer, who are an absolute delight to watch). By morning, the unhappily married Brubaker and the unhappily married Catherine have fallen in love with each other. In fact, they are so deeply in love that both immediately take steps to quit their jobs and leave their spouses to run off to Paris together.
There is much to enjoy in The April Fools. Lemmon and Deneuve give fine performances, and are ably supported by a strong cast including Sally Kellerman (as Lemmon's distant and selfish wife), Jack Weston (as Lemmon's alcoholic friend), Harvey Korman (as an oversexed suburban lothario), and Kenneth Mars and Melinda Dillon (as a "sensitive" New Age couple). Unfortunately, these supporting characters are a little too one-note, with too little screen time, to really make much of them, but these performers all shine whenever they are on-screen. The film also features the Burt Bacharach-Hal David classic "I Say a Little Prayer" (although Dionne Warwick performs the film's title tune, she does not perform this song here, which was a hit for her when she recorded it).
Where The April Fools falls apart is in its superficial treatment of its premise. The events transpire entirely too quickly, and with only the flimsiest of motivation, resulting in an unsatisfactory conclusion that feels both rushed and empty. The implications of such major decisions as leaving one's career and family behind are largely unexplored, and the script seems to be in such a hurry for Lemmon and Deneuve to pair up and fly off to Paris together that it never fully manages to convince us that there is necessarily much potential in the relationship.
The avoidance of dealing with these issues in any depth is perhaps necessary for the romance to resolve itself within the expectations of light romantic comedy. The hollowness of this romantic triumph reveals the underlying desperation of the protagonists -- successful people surrounded by all the trappings and excesses of material culture, but frantically searching for something real in their lives.
This past Christmas Eve, looking for something to do, I saw that a local megaplex theater was showing Frank Capra's It's A Wonderful Life. I decided to go see it on the big screen, as I had just missed an earlier screening of the film at another theater the previous day, and although the film is hardly a "holiday tradition" for me the way it is for some people, it's still a film I like to re-visit every few years.
To be honest, it's a film that I always approach with some trepidation, because it packs such an emotional wallop that I know I cannot possibly go in to see it (or come out of seeing it) casually. In contrast to the hip cynicism (or outright cluelessness) from some quarters that chide the film as saccharine or sappy, It's A Wonderful Life is instead one of the most achingly honest, sincere films Hollywood has ever produced. That it was made at all is, frankly, a wonder. It ranks alongside Leo McCarey's Make Way for Tomorrow (1937) as one of the most emotionally mature films of the Classic Hollywood era.
Its message, that a man's life has inherent value beyond the monetary, is an extremely radical one, certainly a radical one in the Hollywood of 1946, and one unthinkable in our current age of unbridled Capitalism and consumerism run amok. It's not surprising that the FBI cited the film as subversive, anti-American, Communist propaganda at the time of its release (for reference, you can read the full report here). Lionel Barrymore's Mr. Potter is the very personification of the scourge of money, of valuing the almighty dollar above the well-being of humanity. His mean, petty theft of the money that means the difference between survival and disaster to the Bailey Building & Loan perfectly encapsulates the real danger of money: the power that it brings with it, and the ability to wield that power for the sole purpose of furthering one's own gain.
As I suspected, the final third of the film left me an emotional wreck. The celebrated fantasy sequence is an incredibly brutal and emotionally exhausting depiction of the dark night of the soul. There is a moment toward the end that I consider to be one of the very most beautiful in any. It occurs just after Stewart has returned to the spot on the bridge where earlier he had intended to end his life. After experiencing a harrowing vision of the impact his life has had on others around him, he pleads with God to let him live again. At that moment, the snow begins to fall again, silently, an indication of the affirmative answer to his prayer. It's A Wonderful Life is, indeed, a powerful celebration of life and humanity.
Williamson (part of the group of early British filmmakers that French film historian Georges Sadoul called the "Brighton School") was a pioneer of both trick films and narrative films. FIRE! was a direct influence on Porter's THE LIFE OF AN AMERICAN FIREMAN, made at the end of 1902. Although Williamson's staging of the interior scenes is handled nearly identically by Porter, Williamson's shooting of the exteriors of the burning house are made more dramatic by closer placement of the camera and the diagonal framing, which makes the action clearer to the audience.
This is one of Lubitsch's finest films (in a career full of many fine films). It's also one of his gentlest films, directed with a kind of leisurely pace and repressed energy that only heightens the romantic tension between James Stewart and Margaret Sullavan. Lubitsch makes great use of Stewart in a quiet, understated performance. But as with most Lubitsch films, it's really an ensemble piece that belongs to his entire cast of fine character actors, especially Frank Morgan who brings his comic skills to bear in a flawless performance.
Given his background in theater, it is remarkable just how cinematic Bob Fosse's directorial efforts in film were. Indeed, he began directing films at a time when the musical genre had largely become passe, ossified by over-produced, stiff and lifeless works that were a far cry from the glory days of the genre a couple decades prior.
Enter Fosse and Cabaret (1972), which re-defined the genre and breathed real vitality and verve into the musical film. What is remarkable about Fosse's direction is how he uses the camera and editing as another part of his choreography -- not through cute or clever gimmicks but rather by integrating them so completely that they are all really of a piece. His style is at once electric and explosive, and yet, somehow, never calls attention to itself in a way that makes anything seem out of place. The performance of Liza Minnelli is central to the film's style, her physicality so perfectly in-tune with Fosse's visual approach that their collaboration achieves a kind of synergy.
Cabaret follows the relationship between Sally Bowles (Liza Minnelli), an American cabaret singer in Weimar-era Berlin, and British student Brian Roberts (Michael York), who is in Berlin as part of his doctoral research. The cabaret itself, the Kit Kat Klub, serves as a kind of communal spot in a city that is beginning to become overrun with Nazis, whose rise to power parallels the events in the lives of Sally and Brian over the course of the film.
Although based on the hit Broadway show of the same name, for his film Fosse returned to the original source material (The Berlin Stories by Christopher Isherwood) for inspiration, and songwriters John Kander and Fred Ebb jettisoned all but one of the tunes from their Broadway score, and wrote new songs for the film. The result is a remarkably rich, poignant, and stylish film that has lost none of its power.
Tod Browning is so closely associated today with the macabre and often gruesome thrillers for which he achieved his greatest fame (Dracula, Freaks, The Unknown) that it is easy to forget that he worked in a number of different genres. One example is Iron Man (1931), a pre-Code boxing melodrama that was one of three films he made for Universal in the early '30s, sandwiched in between his loose 1930 remake of his 1921 crime drama Outside the Law, and his iconic horror film Dracula.
Iron Man stars Lew Ayres (one year after his star-making performance in All Quiet on the Western Front) as a young prizefighter who bounces back after losing his first fight, but once he achieves some success, his gold-digging wife (Jean Harlow) re-appears in his life, and after convincing him to dump his long-time manager (Robert Armstrong), the boxer's career begins to fall apart.
Browning had a knack for this kind of hard-hitting, gritty, urban material, as evidenced here and in Fast Workers (1933), which makes one curious to see what he would have done had he been able to explore it more frequently in the pre-Code sound film period.
This is an interesting subject from Louis and Auguste Lumiere, of the kind of subject matter one does not typically associate with them.
It would appear to have been inspired by the early trick films of Melies, whose HAUNTED CASTLE of the previous year features a skeleton (although it doesn't dance). Or it could be a case of the Lumieres borrowing from similar theatrical traditions to branch out into new avenues of filmmaking.
Either way, it's an intriguing little subject. What I find most interesting about it is how, despite its fantastic nature, it actually appears quite drab and plain compared to the strikingly rich photographic compositions of the Lumiere actualities, which breathe with life and vitality.
I wonder which of their cameramen shot this subject, and if he ever did anything else similar to it?
There was an anecdote I read years ago -- and I've forgotten where I read it now -- about a joke circulating in Hollywood during World War II, something to the effect of "In the case of an air raid, go over to RKO Radio Pictures -- they haven't had a hit in years."
That always puzzled me, because it seems to me that RKO produced many of the finest individual films of the studio era. Of course, it's possible that this did not translate to big box office hits that some of the other studios may have enjoyed, but the quality of the studio's output speaks for itself with such fine films as Citizen Kane, King Kong, Gunga Din, Bringing Up Baby, Little Women, and the Astaire-Rogers cycle, among many others.
Chief among the examples of RKO's great films must be the 1939 production of The Hunchback of Notre Dame, starring Charles Laughton in the title role. His achingly beautiful performance stands as one of his finest accomplishments in a long career filled with memorable roles. It has been noted that the Hunchback has relatively little screen time for what is the starring role, and yet Laughton's presence looms large over the film. Even when he is off-screen, we never forget about him. Laughton is one of many fine actors in a cast that includes Maureen O'Hara (in her first Hollywood film), Sir Cedric Hardwicke, Thomas Mitchell, and a youthful Edmond O'Brien, among others.
What really stands about the film is its exceptional production values. I have read that, at the time, Hunchback was the second-most expensive production RKO had yet undertaken (the most expensive being Gunga Din, released the same year), and it shows. Medieval Paris is brought to life in great scale on the RKO backlot, aided by impressive matte paintings. William Dieterle, one of the more interesting studio craftsmen working in Hollywood's studio system, and frequent John Ford cinematographer Joseph H. August create a vivid atmosphere that brims with bustling activity in the daylight, and a sense of quiet menace in the shadow of night.
Perhaps because it was released in that remarkable year of 1939, The Hunchback of Notre Dame has been overshadowed somewhat by the other great films of that year, and does not seem to be revived as often as some of those other films (not just the perennial favorites Gone with the Wind and The Wizard of Oz, but also the genre-defining Stagecoach and the Capra classic Mr. Smith Goes to Washington). But it stands as the equal of any of the other great films of 1939, and remains one of the finest achievements of the Hollywood studio system.
Justus D. Barnes (1862-1946), who achieved immortality on film as the bandit who fires his gun into the camera at the end of THE GREAT TRAIN ROBBERY. He came to films from the stage, and worked for both the Edison and Thanhouser companies. He retired from acting in 1917 and later worked as a milkman and ran a cigar store.
The first of Laurel and Hardy's operetta films, and quite possibly the best, adapted from the 1830 show by Daniel Auber. The boys play down-on-their-luck vagabonds in 18th century Italy who reluctantly become the bumbling assistants to the notorious bandit chief Fra Diavolo ("The Devil's Brother"). Comedy highlights include Laurel's "kneesy-earsy-nosey" finger games and Laurel becoming intoxicated while filling bottles in a wine cellar. The soundtrack retains a number of the songs from Auber's original score. Singer Dennis King brings the perfect mix of menace and charm to the title role, supported by a fine cast including Thelma Todd as the bored noblewoman, James Finlayson as her cuckold husband, and Henry Armetta as the long-suffering innkeeper whose inability to imitate Laurel's "finger games" causes him no end of frustration. One of the only Laurel and Hardy films directed by their long-time producer Hal Roach.
Watching THE LADY EVE again, I was struck by something about Preston Sturges' technique that I've written about before here. I always hedge about coming out with this outright criticism of his otherwise marvelous films, but after having recently seen both LADY EVE and UNFAITHFULLY YOURS, those films have re-enforced my opinion that Sturges simply never mastered the kind of slapstick comedy of which he was so fond of inserting into his films, and that, contrasted with the smooth flow of his dialogue, the slapstick moments stand out for their awkwardness.
The major slapstick moments in THE LADY EVE occur during the part in which Fonda is re-introduced to Stanwyck posing as another woman. He is so distracted by her resemblance to the con-woman he fell in love with on his ocean cruise back from South America that he is continually tripping over himself. Fonda, never a slapstick performer, handles the business admirably, but it feels labored and stiff, not helped by the undercranking to underscore the comic effect. Only his third bit of slapstick in this sequence -- when he brings his head up on a tea tray -- provokes the kind of surprised laughter that the best slapstick earns. It is that element of surprise, created from building up the gags, that Sturges seems to struggle to find in these moments.
In a previous post on SULLIVAN'S TRAVELS, I'd written that Sturges never seemed to be able to solve the problem of finding a way to get his characters to fall into a swimming pool. As Joel McCrea and Veronica Lake argue, she threatens to push him into the pool, and in the rather chaotic ensuing struggle between McCrea, Lake and the butler, all tumble into the pool. When Sullivan's valet attempts to pull the butler out of the pool, he is himself pulled in, at which point the scene ends. It's funny enough, but feels chaotic and hurried.
That is something I have come to admire all the more about Sturges' contemporaries in film comedy, especially Leo McCarey, George Stevens and Frank Capra, all of whom had come up in silent comedy and understood slapstick staging and timing inside out. These men knew how to make the slapstick sequences organic to the whole and of a piece, whereas in Sturges' films, these scenes stick out and call attention to themselves.
As a contrast with how Sturges handles the pool scene in SULLIVAN, I would point to the famous scene in Capra's IT'S A WONDERFUL LIFE, with the floor of the high school gym opening up to reveal a swimming pool in the middle of the Charleston contest. As Stewart and Reed dance deliriously, blissfully unaware of the potential embarrassment that awaits them, we watch in anticipation of the big moment when they will fall in. It's a cathartic moment they finally do, and is only heightened by the other students diving in. The flustered school principal, watching nervously from the sidelines, finally decides that it looks like so much fun that he dives in, too -- a nice capper to the sequence. A scene like this could easily be out of place and distracting in a film like IT'S A WONDERFUL LIFE, but Capra draws on his slapstick training to make it entirely of a piece.
As a final point of contrast, I would point to a scene from another Sturges film I had recently seen, UNFAITHFULLY YOURS. This is one of Sturges' most brilliantly conceived and executed comedies, almost like a symphony in its intricate construction. But there is a lengthy and protracted slapstick sequence with Rex Harrison, involving his efforts to retrieve his dictation machine from a top shelf, which brings the proceedings to a halt. Sturges lets this scene play out for minutes on end, and while it was clearly intended to be a comic exercise in frustration à la W.C. Fields, it is instead just frustrating in its failure to build to anything.
I offer this only as an example of how Sturges' contemporaries, who had spent years working in silent comedy for producers like Mack Sennett and Hal Roach, were able to keep the slapstick tradition alive in their films 20 years on. Sturges was unmatched at creating unique comic worlds, populated with his favorite character actors speaking that wonderful concoction of Sturges dialogue that is his hallmark. But when it comes to slapstick, I continue to believe that Sturges never quite mastered finding a way to integrate it into his world of comedy.
It's an interesting contradiction that a film that is so very much of a specific time and place (late '70s Brooklyn, at the height of the Disco craze) has held up so well for 40 years. It's one of those films that, I imagine, must have seemed hopelessly dated in one sense just a few years after its release. But perhaps now, separated by the distance of time, we can better appreciate its strengths and qualities that keep audiences coming back to it.
The story of Tony Manero, a young working-class Italian-American man in Brooklyn struggling to find himself through the only thing that matters to him -- dancing -- is certainly one audiences continue to identify with. John Travolta's star-making performance, John Badham's energetic direction and the pulsating music of the Bee Gees elevate the film to an experience that still brims with vitality. Norman Wexler's script (based on "Tribal Rites of the New Saturday Night", an article by Nik Cohn that appeared in New York Magazine the previous year) is startlingly honest, granting real seriousness to Tony's struggle to move beyond the world he knows and make a name for himself.
After seeing SATURDAY NIGHT FEVER on the big screen, I was struck by just what a nicely-photographed film it is. I think this gets lost when watching the film on TV, or even on DVD, where some of the definition and detail is lost, but there are some moments that are really quite stunning. The cinematographer, Ralf D. Bode, frequently shoots the closeups of Travolta and Karen Lynn Gorney together with a soft, gauzy look that gives them a dreamlike quality, which contrasts effectively with the naturalism of the scenes with Travolta and his friends. He brings a similar quality to the dance sequences (particularly the "Night Fever" number), heightened by the colorful flashing lights and fog on the dance floor. Looking over his filmography, I realize I have only seen a couple other films photographed by Bode, but I do not remember anything particularly unique about their cinematography. In any case, he did really fine work on SATURDAY NIGHT FEVER, which is greatly emphasized by seeing the film on a big screen.
Something that has stuck with me, ever since I first read Roger Ebert's review of CASABLANCA, was his description of it as "The Movie". I knew exactly what he meant by that, and still agree with the assessment. Although I prefer to avoid such hyperbole as "greatest", "best", "most important" and other such ultimately meaningless platitudes in talking about films, there is something about CASABLANCA that has elevated it to a level of enduring cultural iconic status that is, I think, perhaps unique.
It was especially fun seeing the film on the big screen in a state-of-the-art megaplex (the Towson Cinemark theater). We went for the 2pm show but it was already sold out, so we got tickets for 7pm and it played to a packed house. Some of the Bogart cult was in attendance, complete with trenchcoats and fedoras, reciting the iconic lines.
Especially in this day and age, when the moviegoing experience seems to be split between bigger, louder, and emptier Hollywood fare, and the museum-like reverence of the art and revival house, it can be a breath of fresh air to view a classic like CASABLANCA as a living, breathing, vital experience, as fresh today as it was 75 years ago.
Going through my collection of movie soundtrack albums tonight, I came across these two old favorites. One is a collection of recordings of routines by W.C. Fields (subtitled "...His only recording"), also featuring eight songs by Mae West, and the other is a collection of scenes from the films of the Marx Bros., featuring "the original voice tracks from their greatest movies". These albums were extremely popular during the height of the nostalgia craze in the early '70s, and were also quite useful in the pre-home video days, when such albums were the only way to re-visit favorite scenes from these films.
There was also a series of books, many by Richard J. Anobile, that served a similar purpose and included frame blow-ups and dialogue transcriptions from famous films. I have one called Why a Duck?, which consists of scenes from the Marx Bros.' comedies. Anobile wrote others, too, including Who's on First, A Flask of Fields, A Fine Mess, plus individuals volumes on classics such as PSYCHO, THE MALTESE FALCON and FRANKENSTEIN, among others. He even wrote one on THE GENERAL, though it's hard to imagine how his scene-by-scene frame blowups would work for a silent film.
I wonder how many people still collect these? Home video eventually rendered these kinds of books and albums obsolete, but as classic film comedy fans know, it's hard to ever pass up a chance to spend time with your favorite comedians, no matter what the format.
I noticed something interesting at last night's SUSPIRIA screening -- though it was hard to miss, as it was actually quite distracting: sometime around the second half of the film, roughly half the audience began laughing raucously at the film, which totally took me right out of the carefully-crafted, haunting atmosphere of the experience.
It reminded me of my experiences watching VERTIGO, another haunting, dream-like film that often inspires fits of uncomfortable laughter from audiences. At least in that case I can understand the laughter as a nervous response to the increasingly unhinged behavior of the Jimmy Stewart character.
I'll never forget the first time I saw VERTIGO with an audience in film school years ago. There was one moment in particular that got such a strong laugh from everyone in the room but me, and I've never understood it. It occurs when Scottie Ferguson gives the distraught Judy Barton a brandy and tells her to drink it down. That moment got a huge laugh from everyone. The professor, also laughing, said, "Hey, it was the '50s..."
I still didn't get it.
There was another incident I recall, more recently, during a screening of ALL QUIET ON THE WESTERN FRONT at Loew's Jersey City. At the moment of the reveal that Kropp's leg has been amputated, someone in the audience let out a loud burst of uncomfortable laughter, possibly out of surprise. The poor devil was the only person in the entire house to react that way, so it must have been embarrassing.
Taking in a screening of Hitchcock's THE 39 STEPS recently, I realized that this has become probably my most oft-watched Hitchcock film. Certainly it's the one I can return most frequently without losing any of the suspense or freshness of Hitchcock's technique. As I wrote in a recent post on NORTH BY NORTHWEST, sometimes the iconic sequences of Hitchcock's best-known films can come to play better in my mind, where they exist in a kind of rosy retrospection.
That is not the case with THE 39 STEPS, however. It is a film I have seen probably at least a half-dozen times if not more, and each time I am swept up anew in the breathless pace of the endlessly engaging story, the erotic chemistry of Robert Donat and Madeleine Carroll's performances, and of course, Hitchcock's masterful technique that shows his fertile creative mind at its most active and visionary. After the screening, I commented that the film is one of the very few that I would describe as "perfect" -- not a wasted frame or extraneous moment in the entire piece.
I find, more and more, that I am drawn to the early works of directors, often those formative films made before they hit their full stride and became identified with a certain style or genre. I'm not sure if I would consider THE 39 STEPS to be an "early" Hitchcock film, given that it was already something like his 20th film as a director, and made fifteen years after he'd entered the film industry. But it nonetheless contains the kind of energy and vitality and creative experimentation that I associate with the earlier films of directors, and in terms of Hitchcock's filmography, it certainly set the standard for many of his most successful films to follow, not to mention establishing a prototype for the entire espionage film genre.
ROSEMARY'S BABY must have one of the finest casts of character actors since some of the classic Universal horror films of the '30s and '40s. Made by Paramount in 1968, the film straddles the very tail end of the last vestiges of the old studio system, and the era of New Hollywood. And one of the best aspects of the former is the great roster of character actors who make up much of the supporting cast.
Watching the film again at the Charles Theatre recently, right before Halloween, I raced to count all the familiar names in the opening credits: in addition to the wonderful Ruth Gordon, we have Sidney Blackmer, Maurice Evans, Ralph Bellamy, Patsy Kelly, and Elisha Cook Jr., among others. Seeing these familiar faces as characters involved in a Satanic cult makes the proceedings all the more unsettling. Polanski likely chose these actors precisely for their strong identification with certain "types", which would have been especially recognizable to moviegoers in 1968. It's an inspired casting decision.
And I love seeing John Cassavetes do his impression of Elisha Cook!
I watched D.A. Pennebaker's film of MONTEREY POP a few weeks ago at the Senator Theatre in Baltimore for the first time, and hadn't jotted down any thoughts on it yet, perhaps because it is such an "experience" beyond being just a filmed record of the concert.
However, something that I have found myself thinking about quite a bit since then is the way that the film, and indeed, much of the Direct Cinema movement, fuses the concepts and energies of both the documentary and avant garde traditions. There are sequences in MONTEREY POP show the direct influence (and directly influenced?) the techniques of Jonas Mekas' diary film shooting style, for example.
Similarly, if you look at an earlier film by Pennebaker, DAYBREAK EXPRESS (1953), it's difficult to even classify -- is it a documentary of a morning train commute, or an avant garde city symphony (or jazz riff, in this case), animated in light and shadow? Why can't it be both?
