Penn pal

Plus It Happened Here

The Coolidge Corner's spiffy new 40-seat video screening room is off and flying with a booking this weekend (October 13-15) of the Film Society of Lincoln Center's New York Video Festival, four programs getting several showings each. A short-film selection called "Space Exploration" is skippable; and George Kuchar's Secrets of the Shadow World, in which the screwball San Francisco filmmaker calls on bizarre friends, is a bit private and much too meandering at 135 minutes.

But one program is a must: Trent Harris's The Beaver Trilogy (1980-1999), a one-of-a-kind video that, among its many treats, unburies some amazingly off-the-charts thespian performances by the young Sean Penn and Crispin Glover.

Part one of the trilogy: the year is 1980, and documentarian Harris, on the road, comes across a video natural: 21-year-old Larry Huff, a manic gabber who drives a '64 Impala named "Farrah." Larry talks on and on about his beloved home town, Beaver, Utah, where he's well known, he says, for impersonations. "I'm the Beaver Rich Little," he brags, adding that his specialties are Barry Manilow and Olivia Newton-John.

The documentary jumps to talent-show day at Beaver High and to Larry putting on his Newton-John lipstick and blond wig. Well, he looks more like an 18th-century fop than the Australian chanteuse, but so what? The talent show is uproarious Americana, with flat-singing sisters, an exuberant teen Brenda Lee, high-kicking disco girls in boots, and Larry himself doing an Olivia number and then coming back for a Barry encore, some vile song about the rhythms of New York.

Good enough, but part two is the incredible stuff: a part-one repeat, with an actor standing in for the documentary maker (a condescending one who sneers at the amateurs of Beaver) and the great Sean Penn, soon after Fast Times at Ridgemont High, playing Larry and doing a riff off the tape of Larry he's studied from part one. Penn's Larry is far more obviously disturbed than the cheery ball of energy we've already seen; the sad-clown depressive emerges. When the bewigged, big-boots Penn does his Olivia torch number in a grating, heartbreaking falsetto, the moment has Chaplinesque pathos, so funny and so Elephant Man-tragic at the same time.

Parts one and two are plenty! Videomaker Harris pushes on, however, to a third, more loosely fictive variant. Crispin Glover, the Larry recruit, does his characterization, incorporating both the "real" Larry and Sean-Penn-as-Larry. Part three is pretty good, but the brilliance of Sean Penn, so definitive, makes Crispin's vamping redundant.

---

A legendary, long-unavailable film has reached our shores from England and will be screening at the Museum of Fine Arts this Friday (October 13). The 1966 It Happened Here, written and directed by military expert Andrew Mollo and film historian Kevin Brownlow, is a dystopic fictionalized rewrite of World War II wherein the Germans invade England, set up a Vichy-like provisional government, declare London a demilitarized zone, and fight stubborn partisans -- supposedly all Jews and Bolsheviks -- on the fringe. Mollo and Brownlow tell part of their story as a faux newsreel, with simulated documentary footage of London under Nazi occupation, and with all sorts of casual collaboration: local citizenry standing about, blokes shooting the breeze with the Fascist invaders, gals going on dates with them. The focus is on a 30ish nurse whose guy was killed by the Nazis. Declaring herself apolitical, she somehow comes to serve the enemy. "We've fought the war and lost it," she rationalizes. "The only way to get back to normal is to support law and order."

Shot in persuasive black and white, It Happened Here is done with such careful, serious precision that it does feel "real" when, for instance, helmeted Nazi soldiers pose for pictures by the Thames. What's truly amazing is that Brownlow was 18 and "military expert" Mollo 16 when they began this eight-year project.

---

Is the lame George Harrison music, from his Ravi Shankar period, the supposed hook? Or is it the psychedelic art direction: animated amoebae and butterflies, the faux Peter Max scenery? Or young Jane Birkin, several years after impressing as a get-naked teen groupie in Blow-Up, as the nubile object of desire? It's a hard day's night trying to figure out the appeal, either then or now, of Joe Massot's clueless, almost plotless 1969 Wonderwall, which will be screening at the Brattle this weekend, October 13 and 14.

The pinch of story: a fuzzy-haired, absent-minded scientist (Jack MacGowran) gets distracted from his life at the microscope when he discovers a peephole in his wall at home leading to an LSD world. In this trippy alternative universe, gap-toothed Jane, a pouty siren-in-residence, lounges about, occasionally making Kama Sutra love to her Valentino-like bloke. The scientist keeps peeping, and so does the audience. The grapplings we watch are pretty chaste and boring, and that's practically the whole silly film.

Massot is also represented by an accompanying 1965 short, "Reflections of Love," which has random Cinemascope shots of contemporary Londoners culminating in a marriage. The bride is the lovely "dollybird" Jenny Boyd, sister of George Harrison's wife, Patti Boyd.

Gerald Peary can be reached at gpeary@world.std.com

---

The Film Culture archive

---