Jill Clayburgh dancing-prancing around her spacious, sun-filled Upper East Side apartment in t-shirt and panties in An Unmarried Woman was an emancipation proclamation that might have sprung from the pages of New York magazine, where sexual liberation and attractive real estate appeared inseparable for the gal and guy on the go.
In 1975, “psychobabble” entered the popular parlance, and Mazursky’s urbanites spoke psychobabble fluently, a therapy-speak that derived from the fifty-minute hour on the analyst’s couch or chair-a ritual for which Mazursky himself was thoroughly immersed, casting his own therapist to portray one in Bob & Carol & Ted & Alice, Blume in Love, and Willie & Phil, and playing a shrink himself in the ill-fated Faithful (out of kindness we will pass over the fount of wisdom that was real-life psychologist Penelope Russianoff in An Unmarried Woman, whose soothing banalities had reviewers blowing kazoos)-and glossy-magazine trend pieces that furnished the soundbite morsels of cocktail chatter. Mazursky’s comedies were at their characteristic best when they remained rooted to the stage floor, allowing themselves lots of breathing space for improv, giving the actors elbow room to splay. Such a cast: the improbably young Christopher Walken and Jeff Goldblum, Ellen Greene, Antonio Fargas, Lois Smith, Lenny Baker as Mazursky’s autobiographical hero, and Shelley Winters as the Jewish mother of all Jewish mothers, not a suffocater and castrater like Alex Portnoy’s gorgon mom looming loudly outside the bathroom door, but a giant matzoh ball barreling down the track. Next Stop, Greenwich Village (1976), Mazursky’s nostalgic valentine to theater aspiration and bohemian freedom, brims with affection for acting and actors, the intertwining of vanity and insecurity that twists nerves into knots, when every audition might be the Big Break or another stop on the road to rejection. Paul Mazursky loved and appreciated actors because he began as one, studying with famed acting teacher Lee Strasberg and appearing on screen in Stanley Kubrick’s debut film Fear and Desire and Richard Brooks’ The Blackboard Jungle, which daggered the fear of juvenile delinquency into America’s breast. But its use was true to Josh Mostel’s character, and being true to the characters was one of the defining elements of Mazursky’s movies, even those that rolled astray. “ probably would have made more money if I changed it,” he said.
A MATTER OF SIZE SCREENIT SERIES
In Paul on Mazursky, a book-length series of interviews conducted with the director by Sam Wasson, Mazursky regrets not cutting the offending word from the film because it cost him a PG-13 rating-Harry and Tonto was released as an R-and with it a chunk of the potential audience. It was not only the first time I had heard the c-word deployed in film but its shock effect was amplified because it was delivered so so conversationally, so matter of factly, from a character who up to that moment had been pretty much mute. I will never forget the shivering impact of Josh Mostel calling his aunt a “c-t” in Harry and Tonto (my favorite of Mazursky’s films, and not just because of the cat). When Mazursky did use obscenity on screen it was so strategic and unanticipated it resonated like a rifle shot.
A MATTER OF SIZE SCREENIT MOVIE
Not for Mazursky’s “Me Decade” gallery of frizzy neurotics and curly-locked dreamers the four-letter cannonades of Scorsese’s mooks, the rabble-rousing rants of Lumet’s angry underdogs, the lusty outbursts of Jack Nicholson in whatever movie he was devilishly subverting. Even the dialogue in his movies packed less raw-knuckled punch. A Coke bottle smashed into the face of a gunman’s moll (Altman’s Long Goodbye) would have been unthinkable in a Mazursky movie, where jaw muscles got nearly all of the exercise.
As a filmmaker, violence wasn’t part of his vocabulary. His blood didn’t seem beat as percussively as others.
A MATTER OF SIZE SCREENIT CRACK
Of all the American directors associated with the free-wheeling, scraping-the-guard-rails Seventies (Sam Peckinpah, William Friedkin, Sidney Lumet, Robert Altman, Francis Ford Coppola, Hal Ashby, Brian De Palma, Martin Scorsese, Bob Rafelson, even Woody Allen), Mazursky was the one least disposed to crack the snake whip with kinetic excitement or sink into snowdust reverie and smog-haze patches of ennui. Paul Mazursky, who died this week in Los Angeles at the age of 84, was not a director identified with exalted moments and explosive crescendos, for branding images on the movie brain that became embedded our cultural iconography, enshrined in cinema’s highlight reel.
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