Rosencrantz and Guildenstern go west (9/19/01)

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— In fact [responding to your suggestion of a couple of years ago] there’s a scene at the beginning of Godard’s Pierrot le Fou [1965], in which Belmondo, still the discontented bourgeois and not yet the reckless adventurer cruising around the south of France in a purloined Ford Galaxie with Anna Karina, attends a party to network with his business associates, and, in between little vignettes in which topless women recite testimonials to their Maidenform undergarments, converses briefly but memorably with a guy who claims to be an American director named Samuel Fuller [played by an American director named Samuel Fuller] — in Paris, so he says, to film Les Fleurs du Mal. Since Johnny Depp couldn’t have been more than a couple of years old at the time, I have no idea who was supposed to play the lead. But the thought was there.

It’s curious how people who aren’t trained for the job [as stunt men are, for instance] end up falling. The guy in the photograph plummets head downward; I studied the pose, which somehow seemed familiar, and finally remembered the Tarot card of the Hanged Man. — Not found by Madame Sosostris, famed clairvoyante. But here nonetheless. Unreal City indeed.

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This is not Ben Hecht (9/5/01)