Young Elgar Winthrop Julius Enders’s (Beau Bridges) spoiled life of privilege is about to dramatically change in THE LANDLORD
THE LANDLORD (Hal Ashby, 1970)
Museum of the Moving Image
35th Ave. at 36th St., Astoria
Sunday, August 18, free with museum admission, 2:00
Series runs through September 1
718-777-6800
www.movingimage.us
When rich kid Elgar Winthrop Julius Enders (Beau Bridges) finally decides to do something with his spoiled life of privilege, he takes a rather curious turn, buying a dilapidated tenement in a pregentrified Park Slope that resembles the South Bronx in Hal Ashby’s poignant directorial debut, The Landlord. At first, the less-than-worldly Elgar doesn’t quite know what he’s gotten himself into, believing it will be easy to kick out the current residents and then replace the decrepit building with luxury apartments. He pulls up to the place in his VW bug convertible, thinking he can just waltz in and do whatever he wants, but just as his car is vandalized, so is his previously charmed existence, as he gets to know wise house mother Marge (Pearl Bailey), the sexy Francine (Diana Sands), her activist husband, Copee (Louis Gossett Jr.), and Black Power professor Duboise (Melvin Stewart), none of whom is up-to-date with the rent. Meanwhile, Elgar starts dating Lanie (Marki Bey), a light-skinned half-black club dancer he assumed was white, infuriating his father, William (Walter Brooke), and mother, Joyce (a delightful, Oscar-nominated Lee Grant), who are in the process of setting up their daughter, Susan (Susan Anspach), with the white-bread Peter Coots (Robert Klein).
Elgar has a whole lot of learning to do in Hal Ashby’s New York City-set black comedy
Based on the novel by Kristin Hunter, The Landlord is a telling microcosm of race relations and class conflict in a tumultuous period in the nation’s history, as well as that of New York City, coming shortly after the civil rights movement and the free-love late ’60s. The film is masterfully shot by Astoria-born cinematographer Gordon Willis (Klute, Annie Hall, Manhattan, all three Godfather movies), who sets the bright, open spaces of the Enderses’ massive estate against the dark, claustrophobic rooms of the dank tenement. Screenwriter Bill Gunn (Ganja and Hess) and Ashby avoid getting overly preachy in this at times outrageous black comedy, incorporating slapstick along with some more tender moments; the scene in which Joyce meets Marge is a marvel of both. And just wait till you see Coots’s costume at a fancy fundraiser. The Landlord began quite a string for Ashby, who followed it up with Harold and Maude, The Last Detail, Shampoo, Bound for Glory, Coming Home, and Being There in a remarkable decade for the former film editor (In the Heat of the Night) who died in 1988 at the age of fifty-nine. The Landlord is screening August 18 at 2:00 as part of the Museum of the Moving Image series “Fun City: New York in the Movies 1967-75,” guest curated by J. Hoberman and continuing through September 1 with such other Big Apple fare as The Angel Levine, The French Connection, Coogan’s Bluff, The Taking of Pelham One Two Three, and Taking Off.
“He created a new language, modally speaking, harmonically speaking,” Pete Townshend says about guitarist and composer John Fahey at the beginning of In Search of Blind Joe Death: The Saga of John Fahey. “And if that’s not an iconoclast, I don’t know what is, really,” the Who axman continues, comparing Fahey to William S. Burroughs and Charles Bukowski. Those are apt comparisons for the so-called American primitive guitarist who did things on his instrument that no one has done before or since. Decemberists guitarist Chris Funk then calls the multifaceted Fahey, who was born in Washington, DC, in 1939, an “independent label owner, like maybe the first; record collector, musicologist, alcoholic, hobo, thrift store master.” Unfortunately, the documentary, directed by James Cullingham, spends the rest of its nearly sixty minutes cutting between amazing archival footage of Fahey, particularly in an early television interview with Laura Weber in which he shyly talks about his work, uses his guitar as an ashtray, and plays, which is mesmerizing to watch, and various experts trying to describe what might just be indescribable. The documentary never quite flows like a Fahey composition, instead going through fits and starts as talking heads (including Fahey college friend Barry Hansen, better known as Dr. Demento) discuss his influence, which turns out to be more interesting, perhaps, for Fahey purists than for general music fans. However, the scene with record collector Joe Bussard is a riot. Throughout the film, Cullingham, who met Fahey in 1982, dryly reads from Fahey’s writings and regularly returns to images of a turtle, a major Fahey symbol, but the director might have been better served by incorporating more archival footage of Fahey, who never did what was best for his career and today languishes in relative obscurity, twelve years after his death at the age of sixty-one.
Zachary Heinzerling’s 
Peter Jackson continues Tolkien’s immortal tale as Frodo (Elijah Wood) is off to see the wizard (Christopher Lee) at Mordor, where he can destroy evil by throwing the Ring into a fiery volcano. In addition to loyal Samwise (Sean Astin), Frodo is joined by a creature called Gollum (Andy Serkis), which is what you come up with when you mix Yoda with Steve Buscemi. Throw in a bunch of Ents and Orcs, the kingdoms of Rohan and Gondor, and lots of great music and special effects and you have a three-hour film — which earned six more Oscar nods, winning two (Best Sound Effects Editing and Best Visual Effects) — that surpasses the first part and will leave you unwilling to wait another whole year for the conclusion.
