Cotton Candy Club

Driving home from work early Sunday morning, the radio was playing “It Ain’t Necessarily So” from Gershwin’s Porgy and Bess. The tenor’s voice was to-the-back-of-the-hall soaring, precise in enunciation and emoted with the sass the song demands but rarely gets. This was public radio’s Jazz Profiles with Nancy Wilson, who said it was Cab Calloway. Amazon.com revealed this was from a 1959 recording.

Wilson mentioned the 1980 movie Blues Brothers, which seems to have been Calloway’s last screen appearance. What hearing that crystal voice recalled for me, though, was Coppola’s The Cotton Club (1984). Actor Larry Marshall played a Depression-era Calloway for one scene, singing “Minnie the Moocher.”

The Cotton Club got lots of negative reviews, though I see now that Roger Ebert agrees on how wonderful it was. The first time I saw it various scenes seemed like vivid paintings, the same feeling I got from Coppola’s Apocalypse Now. Two I can’t forget, and Ebert noted them, too: The loving-bickering sibling interplay between Bob Hoskins and Fred Gwynne (yes, Herman Munster) and second the bittersweet tap-dance duet between Gregory Hines and his brother Maurice, who played brothers in the movie as well. The movie had moments of great violence, being at its base a gangster movie, and a wordless plot point cleverly alternated with the brothers’ routine, using the irony of the taps sounding like gun fire.

Plus the Calloway scene, which also was doubled up, I think, with Richard Gere romancing Diane Lane out in the audience.

I must’ve seen it in Dallas, then when visiting Fort Smith I dragged my folks to see it. The movie on my second viewing had lost some of its magic, probably because I oversold them on how good it was and I saw they weren’t agape in cinematic joy. When years later I saw it a third time, on TV now, I realized it was made for the big screen and even the Fort Smith Malco Mall Trio screening was better than the little box. (Hoskin’s character was a real person, Owney Madden, who later retired to Hot Springs.)

Which is to say it’s time for year-end movie tallies, and I can’t persuade myself to the critics’ favorite No Country for Old Men. Every December I look forward to all the best-of lists. I don’t see many movies, though I read lots of reviews, and summaries are entertaining and convenient. Lots of the acclaimed movies only now are arriving in cinemas, this being strategy for them to win awards shows later in the winter. I print out Ebert’s, the Christian Science Monitor’s and one or two more, which I leave by the TV so in the year ahead when we plan a video store trip I can make a list for DVD rental.

But now I could sit in a theater and see No Country for Old Men. It’s a hunt for a serial killer, bloody and suspenseful like Cotton Club, not to mention some of the other Coen brothers hits like Fargo. But we’ll probably end up at Charlie Wilson’s War.

Maybe I’ve lost the taste for psycho killer movies. No, I’d go for another Silence with the Lambs.

Last weekend at a video store I considered a recent, well-regarded cop flick, Eastern Promises, but instead rented The Simpsons Movie and the spry Hairspray.

The Simpsons Movie has great writing and acting and special effects. It even has over-the-top violence, opening with an Itchy and Scratchy cartoon-within-a-cartoon.

Seriously, though, Cotton Club and Lambs had subplots galore. As did Fargo. Old Men just sounds one-note: get the bad guy. I’m sure it’s a well-done police (well, sheriff) procedural. It doesn’t seem to be the gore I’m avoiding but that I prefer complexity.

The Simpsons has multiple subplots, too. Homer and Bart’s film has no central plot, come to think of it. Doesn’t need one. -30-