Thursday, 27 September 2007
Manners Mislaid: Ten Bad Dinner Parties On Film
posted @10:56 p.m. by Richard Kelly
The Dinner-Party Scene is the death of many a novel, especially those whose ‘action’ is located among the good newspaper-reading classes of North London. There’s just something about clever-clogs chatter, however tellingly evoked, that sticks in the craw. Dinner gatherings on celluloid present their own special problems. For one, everybody’s sitting down; and this is supposed to be a motion picture. But performance and camera and cutting can elevate all the talk into a real battle, however confined the space. And then there’s the whole issue of what people are wearing. And what horrors may be on the plate. And the slow-burning hatreds between guests. Oh yes, no question, it can work – like a dream, or a nightmare.
10.Borat: Cultural Learnings of America for Make Benefit Glorious Nation of Kazakhstan (US 2006, dir. Larry Charles)
For Bad read Excruciating – though audiences shrieked at the collegiate bravado of Sasha Baron Cohen’s stitch-up-the-Yanks exercise: most especially, perhaps, at the formal dinner in Birmingham, Alabama, where a gathering of genteel southerners are remarkably hospitable to SBC’s phoney Kazak even after he’s brought a bag of steaming ordure to the table.
9. The Rocky Horror Picture Show (US 1975, dir. Jim Sharman)
I’m told this dinner scene isn’t in Richard O’Brien’s celebrated stage musical, but was written especially for moviegoers? Lucky us. It’s a tense party, Tim Curry’s Frank-N-Furter presiding frostily, several guests (including the celebrated Susan Sarandon) stripped to their scanties. The number we’re treated to is all about poor misunderstood biker Eddie (Meat Loaf), who never stood a chance in life. But then Curry whips away the table-cloth and we see just how unlucky Eddie really was.
8. Rope (US 1948, dir. Alfred Hitchcock)
Of course, the notion of deriving a cheap thrill from the act of watching others feast unwittingly over a concealed corpse was appealing to Hitchcock well before any other director.
7. The Texas Chainsaw Massacre (US 1974, dir. Tobe Hooper)
God, but this is depressing. Jesus, poor Marilyn Burns. She’s brought to table with a bag over head and bound with twine. ‘Young lady, you just take it easy there’, she is advised by some dribbling nut-job. ‘We’ll fix you some supper in a couple of minutes…’ But first her finger is cut open so Grandpa can drink. She passes out, maybe long enough to believe it was all a bad dream. But no, Marilyn, you really are bound to a chair made from body parts, and all those nut-jobs are sitting round the table, screeching with glee the louder you scream.
6. Beetlejuice (US 1988, dir. Tim Burton)
This list needs to lighten up, I think. And point of fact, as soon as I think of the house in Beetlejuice, the ghastly 1980s post-modern furnishings, Catherine O’Hara’s loony fake laugh, and everybody convulsively doing the ‘Banana Boat Song’ (O’Hara most stupendously), I feel joy in my heart.
5. Monty Python’s The Meaning of Life (GB/US 1983, dir. Terry Jones)
This is bloody brilliant too. A solid bourgeois gathering at someone’s country cottage, interrupted by a knock at the door from a towering wraith in a cowl, carrying with him a scythe and the reek of the charnel house. ‘Darling, there’s someone at the door, he’s come about the reaping…? I don’t think we need any…?’
4. The Life And Death Of Colonel Blimp (GB 1943, dir. Michael Powell & Emeric Pressburger)
Just one of many great scenes in a masterpiece. Boer veteran General Clive Wynne-Candy (Roger Livesey) has had a long friendship with Lt. Theo Kretschmar Schuldorff of the 2nd Uhlans (Anton Walbrook), even though they once fought a duel and adored the same woman. So even after the Great War and Theo’s internment, Clive makes Theo welcome at a military dinner party where the guests sportingly commiserate with Theo and insist that England wants to see Germany back “on her feet again.” Theo is a little bitter, frankly, but later, on a train to Germany with fellow officers, he realises he has detected a soft underbelly in this insanely English sense of sportsmanship.
3. Eraserhead (1978, dir. David Lynch)
‘So Henry, what do you know?’ That’s about as good as the small talk gets when Henry (Jack Nance) goes round to his girlfriend Mary’s place to meet the folks. She’s knocked up, but that doesn’t mean he shouldn’t run a mile from these freaks, immediately and very fast. Instead he’s served with a pair of radioactive-looking poussins (‘Do I just, uh, just cut ‘em up like regular chickens?’) Then the first cut bird starts to suppurate, its legs twitching, and Mary’s mom starts to fit… Run, son, run.
2. The Exterminating Angel (Mexico 1962, dir. Luis Bunuel)
Beware invitations to Providence Street too. The address may seem elegant, but if the servants are so desperate to get the hell out even before appetisers have been served, then one may assume that some sort of trouble is brewing. Bunuel’s band of snobs find that they are unable to leave, perhaps because of some warped notion of manners. But is it worth dying for? The moral is: never stand on ceremony. One of Bunuel’s many great ideas, so good that he would reprise it.
1. Eureka (US 1983, dir. Nicolas Roeg)
‘The mad-hatter’s tea party’, declares Rutger Hauer, smiling at himself. ‘This is it.’ And it’s #1 on this list because of Paul Mayersberg’s fabulous cut-and-thrust dialogue, delivered in style by an embarrassment of brilliant actors. The gathering round table at a palatial Caribbean pile includes Gene Hackman’s gold-prospecting millionaire Jack McCann, his beloved daughter Tracy (Theresa Russell), her ill-favoured playboy husband (Hauer), plus a Mob lawyer (Mickey Rourke) who represents interests that want McCann dead. But Hackman just wants to get at Hauer, whose natty waistcoat thoughtfully illustrates the kabbalah. ‘Are you a yid?’ Hackman enquires sweetly. He later offers little gold nuggets to all guests in lieu of chocolate (‘Everyone respects a little piece of gold. Even if it’s a wedding band…’) Hauer simply swallows the gift and suggests that, like all things, it will pass. Hackman, furious, orders him from the table, then makes a very bad job of seeming becalmed (‘I won’t rest ‘til I see that man dead…’)
Comments
Great choices, particularly the Roeg. Two I'd add:
Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom (Spielberg, 1984)
The fabulous Maharajah's banquet, with the crunchy beetle appetiser, chilled monkey brains for dessert, and snake surprise, the surprise being that it's full of live eels. Kate Capshaw asks for soup and stirs up a load of eyeballs. I think she faints. A charmingly non-post-colonial view of Indian cuisine.
The Black Dahlia (De Palma, 2006)
The best sequence in the movie, when Josh Hartnett is ushered in past the Linscott family's stuffed dog and cops a load of Fiona Shaw. I'm not quite sure what she's doing with her cutlery in this scene, but it looks like some sort of weird autopsy. The sister (Rachel Miner) gives Hartnett a filthy drawing and he looks about ready to leap out of the window. Brilliantly excruciating.
Yup, got to give Spielberg his due on that one - a wham-bam succession of disgusting plateloads. Isn't there the added kicker that Capshaw has earlier refused a plate of rice and insects from some poverty-stricken villagers, despite an eat-up scold from Dr Jones, and so comes to the Maharajah's table famished and dreaming of a feast? Or even just a burger and fries?
You're dead right. And then she ends up with insects crawling around her face anyway. Still, at least it's not Ant and Dec forcing her to chow down...
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