ESTRAGON:

Why don’t you help me?

VLADIMIR:

Sometimes I feel it coming all the same. Then I go all queer. (He takes off his hat, peers inside it, feels about inside it, shakes it, puts it on again.) How shall I say? Relieved and at the same time . . . (he searches for the word) . . . appalled. (With emphasis.) AP-PALLED. (He takes off his hat again, peers inside it.) Funny. (He knocks on the crown as though to dislodge a foreign body, peers into it again, puts it on again.) Nothing to be done. (Estragon with a supreme effort succeeds in pulling off his boot. He peers inside it, feels about inside it, turns it upside down, shakes it, looks on the ground to see if anything has fallen out, finds nothing, feels inside it again, staring sightlessly before him.) Well?

ESTRAGON:

Nothing.

Pocket Money is a strange little film from 1972 with an impressive set of credentials: featuring Paul Newman and Lee Marvin, screenplay by Terence Mallick (Badlands, Days of Heaven, Thin Red Line), support from Strother Martin, Wayne Rogers, Hector Elizondo, cinematography by László Kovács (Easy Rider, Five Easy Pieces), directed by Stuart Rosenberg (Cool Hand Luke).

Seminal Image: Paul Newman throwing a television set off one of the Westward Ho’s balconies (back when it was still a hotel) into the courtyard below:

The plot is practically non-existent but the movie serves well as a vehicle for Newman and Marvin’s scrappy but essentially clueless would-be entrepreneurs scrambling to make a few bucks. Nothing really happens. Maybe the Waiting for Godot of late-period Westerns?

This clip is as good an example as any…

Pick it up for less than $2 here

Down to Neeb Hall last week to hear Jane Fonda speak on ‘Sex, Gender & the Journey to Wholeness’, ASU’s Women and Gender Studies ‘Women of the World’ lecture.

Always had a soft-spot for Jane, as her resume is a mass of all-too-human contradictions: daughter of an American icon yet counter-culture icon in her own right; advocate for media freedom yet (ex)-wife to one of the biggest media magnates in the world; self-confessed Christian that practices Buddhist yoga; supremely talented actor who arguably delivered one of the key cinematic performances of the 20th century (Klute) yet suffered for years from cripplingly low self-esteem and a need to seek the approval of others; anti-war activist, subject of FBI surveillance and victim of Nixonian COINTELPRO-like disinformation yet best selling 80’s video workout queen…

Jane Fonda speaks at the National Conference for Media Reform Jan 2007, and makes some great points on media ownership, bias and freedom

Add to that a supporter of environmental, human rights and female empowerment causes, ex-wife to one of the Chicago 7 and future Californian State Senator (Tom Hayden), successful author and movie producer… truly, a Curriculum Vitae that emphasizes the Vitae.

Back to Neeb. The audience was a real mixed bag - backpacking students with skateboards, faculty members wearing tie-dye tees, a couple of Scottsdale-type babes who had either wandered in to the wrong place or were making a profound post-modernist statement, and about twenty Vietnam Veterans, there to make their feelings known in regard to the ‘infamous’ picture of Ms. Fonda in Hanoi, 1972, sitting in an NVA gun emplacement - an incident over which she has, and continues to express her regret over.

The generous applause she was introduced to muted the few boos that drifted in from the back, but, audience seated, the Vets proceeded to try and make their point. They had, however, already alienated the audience through their appearance. They wore bandanas, sawn-off leather jackets and tees, and sported large tattooed biceps. Rather than play on the image of sharp, disciplined GI’s, medals and ribbons gleaming with respect for the uniform, God and country, they came off looking like a renegade bunch of bikers out for a few beers and someone to lay a beating on. This served only to intimidate the audience rather than get them on their side.

They threw a few insults - and then, strangely, just left. Ms. Fonda invited them to stay and discuss their grievances in the Q & A following the lecture, but they rather meekly filed out, rather like a group of naughty schoolboys.  The last one disappeared to a perfectly-judged valedictory of “Thanks for coming!” from the stage; the ensuing audience laughter lightening a mood that had quickly grown tense and ugly.

Not sure whether it was the 12-hour airport layover and the lost baggage she had endured in making the lecture on time, or whether she is always this way,  but the next 45 minutes saw a tired and emotional speaker talking with a suprising intimacy of detail.

She related the personal - how society’s role modelling led her father and various men she had known to separate head and heart - to the political: “we keep electing Presidents that are bifurcated!”. Less lecture than confessional, the audience were delivered an unguarded exposition of a troubled psyche’s path to some form of redemption or resolution.

In the Q & A she moved from Social Inoculation Theory to Reviving Ophelia to The Vagina Monologues (”the people that protest the Vagina Monologues are frightened of their vaginas”). Some idiot tried to veil a contemptous diatribe against (again) her appearance in the gun emplacement photo as a question, but all he could really manage to ask was whether she thought her actions had been naive.

How do you respond to that? Somebody asking if something you did nearly 40 years ago might have been naive? Hell, screw 40 years, how many of us can stand up and honestly say we have not been guilty of the same thing in the last 40 days? Or 40 minutes? Cheap words, so carelessly thrown.  And, in a way, already pre-empted by an earlier segment of the lecture where she memorably referred to the name-calling and baiting of proponents of non-violent solutions as ‘a toxic masculinity  governed by shame’. Winner.

And total National Treasure, contradictions very much included.

Classic radical Fonda from Jean-Luc Godard and Jean-Pierre Gorin’s “Tout Va Bien”

A fantastic ‘behind the scenes’ on Klute and early 70’s New York City. A great example of how location - particularly a city - becomes as important an actor in a film as the leads.