Last Exit to Brooklyn [1989] Uli Edel

http://bayimg.com/eaIifaADB Last Exit to Brooklyn (1989) http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0097714/ Last Exit to Brooklyn is a 1989 drama film based on the novel by Hubert Selby Jr. A group of junkies, alcoholics and drag queens lives a dead-end existence of drugs, crime and violence in a working class Brooklyn neighborhood. Stephen Lang ... Harry Black Jennifer Jason Leigh ... Tralala Burt Young ... Big Joe Peter Dobson ... Vinnie Jerry Orbach ... Boyce Stephen Baldwin ... Sal Jason Andrews ... Tony James Lorinz ... Freddy Sam Rockwell ... Al Maia Danziger ... Mary Black Camille Saviola ... Ella Ricki Lake ... Donna Cameron Johann ... Spook John Costelloe ... Tommy Christopher Murney ... Paulie Hubert Selby, Jr. wrote about the lives and problems of the disaffected urban poor. This was back in the days when the pre-gentrified inner cities were often totally run-down, and were still filled with poor, ethnic white people wearing cheap hats and smoking several packs per day. Selby specifically focused on the problems of Brooklyn longshoremen struggling for a decent life amid the heroin addicts, street gangs, and prostitutes that defined their squalid neighborhoods. Of course, many of the union guys used to be in the gangs themselves, and they were generally hard men who often had abusive upbringings, and very often dropped out of school. They were frequently racist and hateful, in that special way that uneducated, downtrodden people with dead-end lives can be. Selby's book showed all of that. It shocked middle America back then in many ways, not the least of which involved the colorful vocabularies employed by his characters. Their language was ... well, kinda salty. English has an expression swears like a longshoreman, and that cliché didn't gestate in a vacuum. Last Exit to Brooklyn started as The Queen is Dead, one of several short stories Selby wrote about people he had met around Brooklyn while working as a copywriter and general laborer. The piece was published in three literary magazines in the late 1950s and early 1960s. Tralala also appeared in The Provincetown Review in 1961 and drew some intense criticism. The pieces later evolved into the full-length book, which was published in 1964 by Grove Press, which had previously published such controversial authors as William S. Burroughs and Henry Miller. Critics praised and censured the publication. Poet Allen Ginsberg said that it will explode like a rusty hellish bombshell over America and still be eagerly read in a hundred years. There had been several attempts to adapt Last Exit to Brooklyn into a film prior to this version. One of the earliest attempts was made by producer Steve Krantz and animator Ralph Bakshi, who wanted to direct a live-action film based on the novel. Bakshi had sought out the rights to the novel after completing Heavy Traffic, a film which shared many themes with Selby's novel. Selby agreed to the adaptation, and actor Robert De Niro accepted the role of Harry in Strike. According to Bakshi, the whole thing fell apart when Krantz and I had a falling out over past business. It was a disappointment to me and Selby. Selby and I tried a few other screenplays after that on other subjects, but I could not shake Last Exit from my mind. In 1989, director Uli Edel adapted the novel into a film. The screenplay was written by Desmond Nakano. The movie starred Stephen Lang as Harry Black, Jennifer Jason Leigh as Tralala, Burt Young as Big Joe, Peter Dobson as Vinnie, and Jerry Orbach as Boyce, as well as Stephen Baldwin, Rutanya Alda and Sam Rockwell in small roles. Selby made a cameo appearance in the film as the taxi driver who accidentally hits the transvestite Georgette (played by Alexis Arquette). Mark Knopfler of Dire Straits provided the film score. The film version received excellent reviews and won a few critics' awards for Leigh's portrayal of Tralala, though its limited distribution and downbeat subject matter prevented it from becoming a commercial success. Ralph Bakshi referred to Edel's film as being like a hot dog without mustard, saying that the film was done horribly. Love stories are about people who find love in happy times. Tragedies are about people who seek love in unhappy times. Last Exit to Brooklyn makes a point of taking place in the early 1950s, when all of the escape routes had been cut off for its major characters. The union official cannot admit to being left wing. The strike leader cannot reveal he is homosexual. The father cannot express his love for his child, the prostitute cannot accept her love for the sailor, and the drag queen is not able to love himself. There isn't even any music to release these characters - rock 'n' roll is still in the future, and the pop ballads of the era mock the passions of everyday life. The characters drink and some of them do drugs, but they don't get high - they simply find the occasional release of oblivion. The movie takes place in one of the gloomiest and most depressing urban settings I've seen in a movie. These streets aren't mean, they're unforgiving. Vast blank warehouse walls loom over the barren pavements, and vacant lots are filled with abandoned cars where mockeries of love take place. When Hubert Selby Jr. wrote the book that inspired this movie 25 years ago, it was attacked in some quarters as pornographic, but it failed the essential test: It didn't arouse prurient interest, only sadness and despair. A full quarter of a century after it became the subject of a celebrated court case centering on the meaning of the term “a tendency to deprave and corrupt”, Hubert Selby Jnr.’s American classic reaches the screen imbued, despite its all-American cast and locations, with a profoundly European sensibility. Producer Bernd Eichinger (The Name Of The Rose, The Never-Ending Story) first worked with Edel on Christiane F, a tale of heroin addiction and youthful despair set in Berlin and best known for its David Bowie score and inordinate length. Scarcely surprisingly, their interpretation of Selby’s vernacular sleaze presents the low-life of 1952 Brooklyn as an exercise in stylised American-retro costume and mannerism. It looks like the first X-rated Levi’s 501 commercial; all quiffs, jeans, Big Suits and reverent recreations of the kind of Edward Hopper neon-diner grunge the commercial-makers dote on. Collapsing Selby’s half-dozen vignettes into a single sustained narrative, Last Exit becomes an ensemble piece with uniformly powerful performances: Jennifer Jason Leigh heists the entire movie as Tralala, the neighbourhood tramp, though Stephen Long’s corrupt closet-case union boss and Alexis Arquette’s tormented drag queen run her close. (Ricki Lake — the delightful star of John Waters’ Hairspray — has a nice cameo which requires her to do little except cry, smile and be pregnant. The script uses great wodges of Selby’s original dialogue but his narrative style can’t be reproduced cinematically, which reduces chunks of the movie to post-Scorsese scenes of Italian-Americans in their underwear yelling at each other, which is no longer a novelty. So, Last Exit To Brooklyn again proves that great novel do not necessarily make great movies. (Paradoxically, mediocre novels fare better, probably because there is less to compete with. What price Coppola’s Godfather against Puzo’s or De Palma’s Carrie against King’s?) Impressively staged, powerfully performed and exquisitely designed, Last Exit To Brooklyn attempts to compensate with sheer style what it lacks in content. It comes closer to succeeding than one might have feared; in an era dominated by schlock — and cowardly schlock at that - this is no mean feat.

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LonePigsy (2012-11-19)

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sarabear1 (2013-03-18)

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