The Best Old Movies on a Big Screen This Week: NYC Repertory Cinema Picks, October 5-11
… All the Marbles (1981)
Directed by Robert Aldrich
For his final act, Aldrich found riches of humor and stubborn dignity in the unlikely world of women’s wrestling. Too much fun for reverence, the rollicking film nevertheless avoids mocking or debasing its tag-teaming wrestlers (Vicki Frederick and Laurene Landon as “The California Dolls”) or their saw-spouting, soft-centered but adamant manager (Peter Falk). It’s not above a voyeuristic shower cry (with Frederick’s arms lifted just so), and it does allow for one tank top-shredding mud match outside Cincinnati, but even there, the trio only agree because it will boost their pay grade, and the Dolls make sure to dunk the cornball promoter, who then must tromp to the bleachers to ooze aside his offended wife.
In a role written for Paul Newman, the thankfully cast Falk is perfect—hard-bitten but also something of an epigrammatist, tossing off adages both stale (“Candy is dandy…”) and more inspired (“Unfortunately, in the words of Toulouse-Lautrec, I’m a little short”). Stopping a catfight, he mumbles, “I hate to break up this duel of wits.” Cautioning against using his potent-in-Ohio “funny dice” in Reno: “In this town you’d find yourself laid to rest beneath Liberace’s parking spot.” These gems and the plotting of this briskly moving road-sports film hybrid are credited to Mel Frohman, whose only other points are from shabby TV movie jobs, so you have to assume uncredited Carson and Letterman staffers Michael Barrie and Jim Mulholland furnished much of the good stuff, much of which comes in the form of a hurricane of offscreen ADR. A wholly committed Falk gives no indication that this subject matter is beneath him, full-throatedly hectoring refs (“You’re missing a hell of a fight!”) and nursing a dormant love for former flame Frederick’s Iris, especially when he must endure her sleeping with oleaginous venue owner Cisco (inevitably, Burt Young) to score the film’s climactic, thirty-minute real time bout at Reno’s MGM Grand (MGM being the film’s distributor, in a happy coincidence). Falk seems to channel his buddy Ben Gazzara from The Killing of a Chinese Bookie, a film also about the dignity of the disreputable entertainer which likewise shades into filmmaker autobiography.
…All the Marbles makes for a personal, appropriately rambunctious victory lap and bow-out for Aldrich, whose repeat collaborators here include cinematographer Joseph Biroc (the blue-brown hues of industrial northern Ohio are especially nice), producer William Aldrich (his son), and actors Richard Jaeckel and Young, who was also in Twilight’s Last Gleaming and The Choirboys. The affecting Frederick and Landon both cared enough to endure extensive wrestling training for the film, and those aren’t doubles in the ring during the multiple rough bouts. “Mean” Joe Greene cameos as himself introducing the Reno match, which is announced by Los Angeles sportscasting legend Chick Hearn (coiner of “slam dunk”), who seems just as excited as we are when the Dolls finally bust out the dreaded “sunset flip”. Justin Stewart (October 5, 9pm; October 7, 7:30pm, 10pm at the Metrograph’s Aldrich retrospective)