Secluded Cinema: CHANGE OF HEART

I've been reading Dennis Bartok and Jeff Joseph's fascinating book, A Thousand Cuts: The Bizarre Underground World of Collectors and Dealers Who Saved the Movies. One passage that especially struck a chord was about the late filmmaker Curtis Harrington, who "recalled in detail seeing a nitrate print at Paramount Studios of the now-lost 1929 Josef von Sternberg silent film The Case of Lena Smith, while writing his monograph in the late 1940s on the great filmmaker. The movie had vanished, but it still existed, however faintly, in the reflection of Curtis's aged eyes.."

This made me ponder if in this age, where we live under the illusion that we're always a click away from viewing just about every movie ever made, can we also be in the precarious position of solely relying on one's memory of a film that has similarly disappeared in our lifetimes? The answer is undoubtedly 'yes'.

In the 139th attempt to re-ignite this blog, Secluded Cinema will be a regular feature (renamed from the older, more loquacious semi-regular column, Hard To Find Films I'm Seeking This Week) which will highlight films that (as far I know) have dropped from view. It is unlikely that many of the movies to be discussed here are lost per se, just simply unavailable in any format for public access. But if these words raise awareness of an elusive title, and prompt people to get those movies out to whoever wants to see them, then they will have succeeded.

One could feasibly fill this column with nothing but Canadian titles. (The next two Secluded Cinema columns will also be Canadian movies. I'm in a patriotic mood after all, since it's our 150 this year!) What permeates our community that after fledgling theatrical dates and sporadic plays on television, people are just content to leave their work collecting dust in attics, basements and film vaults? Does our distribution system or filmmaking practice incite such negativity in people that they'd prefer to avoid further hurt by just letting work remain buried, out of the hands of future generations who might want it?

Cue director Don Shebib's film, Change of Heart. The film played a week theatrically in Toronto during the spring of 1993,  received sporadic air dates on Moviepix and Bravo as late as 2000, and then has seemingly dropped from view. I don't believe it ever had a domestic video release. In the 120-plus years of cinema history, 17 years is not that long a time. It seems baffling that such a comparatively young picture from the VCR age is so elusive. 

Unlike most of the titles you will see in this column, I actually saw this one back in the day, on Bravo, when they generously broadcast Canadian films... many of which are now similarly, frustratingly, difficult to see in any format.  This unpretentious little fable, written by Terence Hefernan, developed from a story by him and Shebib, features a young girl (Sarah Campbell) who wins the lottery, and then hires her hustler cousin (Jeremy Ratchford), who certainly needs the money, to help find her biological father, and keep her out of a foster home.  I'm no angel sometimes. l'll admit that my initial reaction to this movie was rather hostile. Maybe it was a bad day, but when I think back, I now perceive my criticisms to be the film's virtues.

The film felt twenty years older, in part for its low-key tone, and its docu-style cinematography by Shebib's regular cameraman, the late great Richard Leiterman. But now, I wish more contemporary films were like that. After screenings of over a thousand other films since, however, this movie has remained in my mind, for its revelation in the final act, and the sad poetry in the last line: "Let's go have a cheeseburger." One could say that after all this time, this movie has continued to haunt me, while others since have faded from memory.

Change of Heart may not be one of the director's major works, but it is sadly an example of the infuriating difficulty in seeing films even by Canada's most celebrated filmmakers. In recent years, I've re-acquainted myself with several other Don Shebib pictures. His subtlety, efficiency and economic storytelling is exactly the kind of cinema we need more of today. Check those T-120s in your closet. It's time to bring this film back. I'll even settle for a Youtube link.

Right and Below: scans from The Toronto Star in 1993, featuring Rob Salem's review of Change of Heart, Jamie Kastner's interview with its director, and a sadly prophetic piece by Susan Kastner about the film's disappearance from screens.

Second Wind (1976)

Director / Editor: Donald Shebib
Writer: Hal Ackerman
Producer: James Margellos
Cinematographer: Reginald H. Morris
Music: Hagood Hardy
Olympic Films; 93 min; color

Cast:
James Naughton (Roger), Lindsay Wagner (Linda), Ken Pogue (Pete), Tedde Moore (Paula), Tom Harvey (Frank), Louis Del Grande (Howie), Gerard Parkes (Packard), Jonathan Welsh (Simon)

Roger Matheson has a well-paying job as an aggressive Toronto stockbroker, a beautiful wife, and a nice house in the burbs. However, early on, we detect that something is missing, as he is stuck in a traffic jam, and looks at some joggers in the background. Although always a casual spectator of the sport, Roger decides to take up running himself- the remainder of the film details how this new vocation becomes an obsession that replaces his responsibilities on the job and in domestic life.

While it may seem that running is a symbol of freedom, which could represent Roger’s yearning to escape from his daily rut, Hal Ackerman’s script for Second Wind is much more complex than that. In an early scene, when Roger is watching television documentary footage where one comments on sports being an act of one person attempting to gain superiority over another, it is perhaps this notion more than any other that inspires him to put on a pair of sneakers. As we’ve already seen with introductory moments at the workplace (in which director Shebib uses his documentarian instincts for some vivid “fly-on-the-wall” glances at the daily grind in the stock exchange), Roger is ruthlessly competitive. His transferal from casual spectator of running, to practicing the sport in a professional race, simply provides him another avenue in which he can claim his superiority.

As the film progresses, running instead becomes a metaphor for lies and infidelity. During one morning jog, Roger is hit on by a socialite Paula, whose sexual motivations are blatantly obvious. True to form, Roger simply gives her his business card, and she even becomes a client for no other reason than to begin a physical relationship. However Roger’s current obsession with mastering the sport precludes any interest in sex- even Linda’s ploy for intimacy (via a weekend getaway) is thwarted by his obsessive training.

Almost all of the other male characters cheat on their spouses: in fact, Roger is encouraged by his co-worker to hop in the sack with Paula, and his next door neighbour Howie even confides that he’s being unfaithful. Roger’s relationship with Paula intriguingly remains platonic- perhaps she becomes the surrogate partner who offers the support that Linda does not. (Although at first Linda attempts to understand her husband’s current obsession, but these moments result in embarrassment and estrangement.) Instead, Roger’s infidelity occurs when he lies to his wife about being away on a business trip in the south when he’s really a two-hour drive up north, training for the race. When he is caught in his lies, the emotion is much the same as though she walked in on him having an adulterous tryst.

Despite the expected "trainee and grizzled old coach" relationship, and the overtly sentimental score by Hagood Hardy, Second Wind is no Rocky: this isn’t about an underdog whom we can identity with for overcoming all the odds. It is about a high-rolling selfish prick who needs another conquest. It may not be incorrect to assume that running provides an escape from his stifling existence, but the greater truth may be that once Roger has achieved something, he foolishly takes it for granted that these things will always be here, and therefore does nothing to maintain them.  While he's on the track, he assumes that the big account at work, and the problems at home will resolve themselves.

I don't think the viewer is meant to sympathize with Roger- the film remains largely non-judgmental of his behaviour, yet cannily shows our protagonist at his best and (mostly) worst. Hal Ackerman's script allows us to see many sides of his characters. While for the most part, Linda is a sympathetic, compassionate human being, she too can act as child-like as Roger. Despite how much Howie seems to brag that he's getting a little something on the side, he also is seen as a caring, providing father and husband. The most intriguing revelation is seeing Paula adapt from a sexual predator to a sensible person whose advice to Roger is perhaps the most profound in the film (or at least, the only one that he seems to listen to).

We however may end up identifying with Roger precisely because we share that desire to aspire to greater things, and also we can recognize these screwed-up people onscreen as familiar characters in our own lives. While Second Wind may follow the mechanics and structure of a "sports training" film, replete with slow-motion race sequences, and can be enjoyed as such, but it clearly has other things on mind, and remains all the more interesting for that additional subtext. The movie may have lofty ambitions as a treatise on the hang-ups and foibles of (then) modern urban life (where an ugly, muddy brown canvas of urban life clashes with the lush greens of the track-and-field), yet it works due to Shebib's trademark low-key approach and economic storytelling.

Down The Road Again (2011)

Director / Writer: Donald Shebib

Producer: Robin Cass

Cinematographer: Francois Dagenais

Union Pictures; 85 min; color

Cast:

Doug McGrath (Pete), Kathleen Robertson (Betty-Jo), Anthony Lemke (Matt), Jayne Eastwood (Betty), Cayle Chernin (Selina), Tedde Moore (Annie)

Like many viewers enamoured with the 1970 film Goin Down The Road, I had always hoped that director Don Shebib would create a sequel to his Canadian classic. What had happened to Pete and Joey after the film fades out? After having experienced their hopeful emigration to greener pastures from the Maritimes to Toronto, our heroes find despair and economic hardship, and then after a poorly planned plot to steal some groceries which ends in violence, flee to an uncertain future in the west coast (Joey leaving behind a pregnant newlywed wife). For years, Shebib had resisted requests to do a followup film, until finally Cayle Chernin (who played Pete's unrequited love interest in the original) persuaded him to revisit the path charted by this groundbreaking film.

Rip-Off (1971)

Out of respect to the passing of Richard Leiterman (see below), I decided that today's movie would be his and Don Shebib's followup to GOIN' DOWN THE ROAD.... the wonderful hippie road movie RIP-OFF (1971). This was also released on VHS way back in the early days of video rentals with the title VIRGIN TERRITORY, which makes it seem like a PORKY'S ripoff, which it certainly is not.

Don Scardino (today a TV director) stars as a hippie high school student who goes on an odyssey to check out this commune property that he has appropriated out in the sticks, chiefly just so he can get into bed with a classmate (played by the angel-eyed Susan Petrie). Don't let this synopsis fool you- this is a very funny, wise, and even rather touching movie. Yes, adolescent growing pains have been an oft-filmed subject for eons, but when the result is as engaging as this, why carp?

Not only are the small group of young men on the verge of being adults, they are also being seduced by the archetypal image of the hippie, so that they can forsake their prep school ties and jackets. You get to see some great footage of a rock concert in Nathan Phillips Square, a poster in a school hallway advertising a Friday night dance with music by Sonny Greenwich (!!!), as well as people with a lot of bushy sideburns. Scardino had just been in HOMER, a Canadian-lensed counterculture movie where he again plays a restless hippie youth, and he was an enjoyable presence in 1970's movies. After making a handful of pictures in the 1970's (including Cronenberg's SHIVERS, and one of my favourites, LIONS FOR BREAKFAST), the charming and talent Susan Petrie just seemed to disappear. Ah, Ms. Petrie, where are you now?

Richard Leiterman 1935-2005

I just learned the night before that Richard Leiterman passed away last month. Mr. Leiterman is an institution in Canadian cinema. This very busy cinematographer is perhaps best known for his work on the classic GOIN' DOWN THE ROAD. However, he had done several films for its director Don Shebib and also several features for Allan King. among others.

An important early credit in his career was as DOP for Frederick Wiseman's cinema verite masterpiece HIGH SCHOOL (1968). Wiseman was/is one of the Godfathers of the Direct Cinema movement, which brought a fresh new approach to documentary filmmaking (filming on the moment, no voiceover narration) that still stands miles above the diluted version of the format seen in all of that horrible Reality TV. Unsurprisingly, Mr. Leiterman was hired by Allan King for his Direct Cinema classic, A MARRIED COUPLE (1969), a searing documentary in which an all-too-candid camera shows us the crumbling marriage of Billy and Antoinette Edwards. When King went on to fictional narrative films, he often employed Leiterman as well (specifically, WHO HAS SEEN THE WIND and SILENCE OF THE NORTH).