From the Vault: September 2021 Streaming

Arthurian Legends, Ingrid Bergman and Isabella Rossellini, Underrated Character Actors, and "Scene 98"

From: September 2, 2021

Hey everyone,

Welcome to September! Summer is over and I've felt a strange, unshakable melancholy in these humid, hot final days of what was supposed to be the summer of George, which the Atlantic has titled “The Unbearable Summer.” The city is crowded, my friends are away, and I'm on my own, as the Greek chorus once opined. As always, movies have served as a cool respite from the dog days doldrums, and I’ve got a few new streaming themes to settle in with as we head into Labor Day weekend. This month is a real mixed bag, so let's just get right into it:

Strange Women Lying in Ponds Distributing Swords is No Basis for a System of Government: King Arthur and Camelot on Film

King Arthur’s knights, including an appropriately dishy Gawain (Humbert Balsan) are disillusioned and decimated after a futile search for the Holy Grail in Robert Bresson’s Lancelot du Lac (1974).

One balm for the unbearable summer has been the Hero's Quest Vince and I have been on since diving into the cool, moody waters of the Irish countryside in David Lowery’s film The Green Knight, which was finally released this summer after a year's delay due to COVID. Our heroic quest is one of knowledge: Lowery’s film, adapted from the medieval anonymous poem Sir Gawain and the Green Knight (which is both weirder than you might assume and involves much more kissing than anticipated), inspired us to nerd out on the boys of Camelot and dream up a retrospective on adaptations of Arthurian legends, presented here. If you haven't had a chance to see The Green Knight, I highly recommend renting it (or preferably seeing it in theaters if you feel comfortable!) because, as I quickly learned, the track record for film adaptations of Arthurian legends is...not great! Mostly adapted from the 15th century prose Le Morte d’Arthur, which condensed a number of French and English works for the sake of cohesive folklore, these films are more focused on the abstracted characters themselves rather than the chivalric romances and texts that informed their existence. The best adaptations (Éric Rohmer’s Perceval le Gallois, Robert Bresson’s Lancelot du Lac, The Green Knight, even Monty Python and the Holy Grail) come from a real passion for the actual text of the myths they are translating...but more often than not, Arthurian adaptations are about reaching a commercial audience under the appeal of Epic Adventure and Romance. My pet theory is that each decade gets the adaptation they deserve: in the 50s and 60s, mostly irreverent garbage. The 70s? Arthouse adaptations by the French that are near impossible to find and a Brechtian masterpiece by the Monty Python gang. The 80s? Low-budget, [low-key terrific] trash with Helen Mirren in fetish wear. The 90s? A swoony romance starring big names. The aughts? A Jerry Bruckheimer big-budget [low-key terrific] mess filled out with suspiciously attractive actors. The 2020s? A Netflix show that no one has heard of, cancelled after one season, while an A24 arthouse version quietly does well at a COVID-ravaged box office. Regardless of quality, I think each iteration of these Arthurian adaptations seeks to convey the ways in which these aging tales still bear meaning to our time, and it’s fascinating to see how such texts shift over time, particularly in studying Hollywood's shifting priorities.

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This month’s actors showcase, born out of an accusation from Vince that I don’t feature enough women, attempts to atone for my shameless gatekeeping by focusing on two of the best women to ever do it. They just happen to be mother and daughter!

“I’ve gone from saint to whore and back to saint again, all in one lifetime”: The Remarkable Career of Ingrid Bergman

Ingrid Bergman’s face card never declined, even when she was cast against type (as she seemingly was in Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde (1941), Victor Fleming’s surprisingly lurid adaptation of Robert Louis Stevenson’s iconic 1886 novella. Critics made fun of Bergman’s awkward “cockney” accent and sophisticated bearing in playing a low-class sex worker tortured by the villainous Mr. Hyde, but she brought a real dramatic heft to the part (and looked otherworldly doing it)!

One of the greatest actors of her generation, this titan of classic cinema and three time Oscar winner weathered a moral panic that should have sunk her career. Instead, she moved to Europe and appeared in a number of canon classics before successfully and triumphantly returning to Hollywood, solidifying her place in cinema history. Roger Ebert once wrote that “her face seems to have an inner light on film,” and it’s indeed difficult to describe her appeal without sounding like a besotted lover: with a rich, accented voice, angelic face, and a heady mix of glacial beauty and smoldering sex appeal, the Swedish-born actress began her career in Swedish film before moving to Hollywood and making a name for herself in a number of 1940s melodramas, including stone cold classics like Gaslight (1944) and Casablanca (1942). But her affair (while married) with (also married) Italian director Roberto Rossellini on the set of their 1950 film Stromboli, which resulted in a pregnancy, caused an international scandal, making it impossible for her to find work in Hollywood. Condemned on the Senate floor as a “powerful influence of evil,” she lost custody of her child (Renato Roberto Ranaldo Giusto Giuseppe Rossellini) and dodged accusations that she was a whore and a home-wrecker (one of my favorite photos of her, taken by Gordon Parks on the set of Stromboli, is, to me, the definitive image of defiant womanhood; as if the scandal is crouching in wait to overtake her in all her beauty and perfection and surface girlishness). Of course, she eventually defied all attempts to bury her and render her ruined goods. Yet in all her triumph, and as celebrated as she was for her success and beauty, it’s still easy to take for granted her skill as an actor, even though she was so decorated during the time...she just made it look that easy. Her story is one of one woman’s feminist struggle to overcome the patriarchal, conservative mores of her time that tried to bury her for daring to step out of line.

“The reason of my life is not to be the most beautiful woman in the world”: The Diverse Works of Isabella Rossellini

Isabella Rossellini, brave and raw, gives one of the great performances of late 20th century film as a tortured torch singer in (the late!) David Lynch’s Blue Velvet (1986).

Another soothing balm in these dog days of summer has come from diving deep into the General Vibes of Isabella Rossellini: her eccentric sense of humor, her loyal chickens, and her creative output as a writer and director, as well as an actress. One of the few instances of Hollywood nepotism where the offspring is as much a star as the parent, this model, actress, and activist is an eclectic talent in her own right, with a particular knack for dark comedy and films with complicated tone and style. In addition to her career-defining work in Blue Velvet with former partner David Lynch, she's celebrated for her performances in the films of Canadian auteur Guy Maddin, as well as her award winning-short films about animal mating rituals, Green Porno, which showcase her love for learning and strange sense of humor. She possesses a deep sensuality that's effortlessly European and chic, yet there's something so perverse and right when she plays characters stuck in the gutter: as if her pedigree is just an act and “Ingrid Bergman's daughter” was the first role she ever played. Offscreen, she's deeply cool: a champion of film, she funds film preservation and has worked tirelessly to memorialize the careers of her parents, Italian filmmaker Roberto Rossellini, as well as her mother, Ingrid Bergman. When my mother (brag) interviewed her in 2010, she was actively taking classes at NYU (“so is my daughter,” she told her, allegedly, meaning Isabella Rossellini considered my existence, momentarily) to enrich her life; she has a pandemic film club where they study Visconti, Wilder, and Fellini; she runs her own farm on Long Island, where she makes her own honey and raises seeing eye dogs. She made history as a longstanding face for Revlon and deliberately defied industry standards and assumptions about age. Her self determination, particularly in our era of nepotism models and actors, makes her endlessly compelling both as Bergman's reverential daughter and as an artist fully defined on her own terms.

The Timeless Allure of "That Guy": Underrated Character Actors

Aida Turturro is best known for her role as Janice Soprano on The Sopranos, but she’s been in the game forever, always popping up to steal the show with what little screen time she’s given. In her film debut—Nancy Savoca’s terrific, underseen anti-romantic comedy True Love (1989)—she plays the unflappable, forever-supportive maid-of-honor to her best friend (Soprano’s Annabella Sciorra).