My favorite movie, part 1

AMC showed "The Sting" twice last night: once in its regular restored version, once with the subtitles that purport to elicit crucial information about the movie in real time. (Who knew, for example, that the Saran Wrap during the "Greased Lightning" song in "Grease" stood for sex, in that--in those days--poor urban kids (of which the T-Birds were exemplars) would use their mothers' Saran Wrap as a cheap prophylactic.) As it happened, I purchased the "Sting" DVD on Amazon a few weeks ago and watched the movie straight through three times, plus the documentary on The Making Of, plus the trailer. As a package, the DVD rates about a B: no excluded scnes, interviews held to a bare minimum. But throughout, as I played one segment after another, I sat transfixed, gulping in every word, every image.

"The Sting," you see, is my favorite movie.

In reviewing "La Dolce Vita," Roger Ebert made a comment that has stuck with me: good movies remain what they are. For Ebert, "The Graduate" remained what it was, and his 1997 re-assesment of the film, downgrading it from four stars to three, reads like an account of a personal betrayal. Ebert's main thesis was that Benjamin should have simply run off with Mrs. Robinson, the smartest, most sensitive, and yes, best-looking character in the film--an opinion whose merits I see, having had my own Mrs. Robinson experience a dozen years ago.

On the other hand, for Ebert, great movies keep coming at you differently, depending on your circumstances. He first saw "La Dolce Vita" in his youth, when Fellini's "The Sweet Life" was everything he aspired to: the clubs, the late nights, the parties in rich mans' houses. He saw it again as a young adult, as a party animal on when the crowd he ran with in Chicago almost consciously aped the behavior of Marcello Mastrianni's group, with the clubs, the late nights, etc.

There is a sensitive point here. Over the past decade, Ebert has made a few veiled references to his status as a recovering alcoholic. (Re "Sideways": "Whenever an alcoholic tells you what he is planning, what he's planning is his drinking.") It is apt to point out here that, in the late 1970s, when they both were becoming famous, Ebert closed down a few places with his fellow Chicagoan John Belushi. When Belushi died from a massive cocaine/heroin overdose in his early thirties, Ebert, in his rememberance of Belushi, recalled a night when Belushi essentially re-created (this time in real life) the Jack Daniels chug-a-lug scene from "Animal House." Ebert, who recalled that he was "pretty far gone" himself that night, wondered not why Belushi did what he did, but how he could--how he could possibly drink in a way that would put the rest of us in a coma.

For all his references, nowhere besides his review of "La Dolce Vita" does Ebert simply state the stark facts of his life. When he saw "La Dolce Vita" a third time, he writes, he had stopped drinking and could look on the characters as objects of pity, never more so than Mastrianni's character, who tried one pathetic morning to try and write a novel (his typewriter outside, his paper flapping in the breeze, he himself trying to concentrate through a triphammer hangover.

So this is the definition of great films: they change for us as we change.

When I first saw "The Sting" I was ten years old, in a Phoenix drive-in, and was simply blown away. The music, the color, the wardrobes. The huge surprise at the end. Did I mention the music? My only sense of betrayal was the difficulty keeping track of the lead players. I had Paul Newman and Robert Redford in my mind from "Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid": Newman was the clean-shaven overgrown kid, Redford the hard-bitten mustachioed realist. The shock that not only had they swapped mustaches but also personas was my first major ajustment. Who the hell was whom? For a few strange moments I thought the guy at the beginning, Detolla, was either Newman or Redford or both. When I finally settled down, I saw a world I wanted to enter, with my pin-striped suit, tam-o-shanter and wisecracks. This was a world that was bigger and brighter than the Phoenix of my youth, and I desperately wanted in.

I saw "The Sting" about ten times over the next few decades, and here--knowing the ending, braced for the surprises--I could simply enjoy it as a bravura piece of filmmaking. On the DVD I saw Robert Redford, Ray Walston, and Eileen Brennan interviewed, and all said the same thing: that David S. Ward' screenplay came to them as perfect as a duck's egg, the best screenplay they'd ever seen. I'm always a sucker for an ensemble piece, for supporting characters in all their glory. The first two "Godfather" movies are an ideal example, as is "Presumed Innocent," with John Spencer's detective and Paul Winfield's judge. With Brennan, Walston, Harry Gould, even the pool hall landlord with his one memorable line ("Never heard of the place"), "The Sting" became something akin to an actors' Olympics. For twenty years I would judge it as such.