I was sitting in Kendall Square, the courtyard outside the Marriott, waiting for friends. The T regurgitates you from the earth onto a brick-paved courtyard, neatly decorated with some street trees hemmed into planters, a sprinkling of metal benches, enough to make sitting possible. At almost 8, on a Saturday, the square was empty, a small knot of a group, chatting animatedly, and some stragglers, obviously waiting for people.
I sat down, resigned to waiting. The Longfellow was to my left, the curve of Broadway sweeping onto the bridge. To my right, cooly animated in the greying light, was F. O. Gehry's generically post-modern Stata Center, a post-Bilbao crazy-quilt for the prestige of MIT.
The square was largely deserted. A woman walked up to the inbound Kendall T stop, across the street, and then down the stairs. I kept looking around, secure under my tree. Sun was setting, more or less, not with any great alacrity, but in the steady ebbing of a summer's day. Because of the silence, the breeze was making most of the noise. Main Street, Cambridge, which divides the inbound and outbound pavillions of Kendall/MIT, features a row of festive flags, advertising "Cambridge Central," in variegated, multi-colored resplendency. Each flag, suspended from a boom, was also anchored with chain. The flags, catching the wind, were producing a variety of harmonics: the taut flapping of the cloth, the dull thunk of the wooden booms smacking against the flagpoles themselves, the chink of the chain being grated against metal.
Remarkably symphonic, really, but comforting, the varying tones, flap, chunk, bang, flap, whistle, pivot, bang! There's a pleasing sibilance to hearing flags or sails twist in the wind, to make their own quiet, accidental music. This is, incidentally, mirrored by the "Pythagorean" organ, downstairs, in the Kendall/MIT station. Hollow pipes, tuned to varying tones, can be "played" by getting an appropriate frequency, waveform, however you want to put it, to register in suspended mallets. You rock a handle, back and forth, building up amplitude, until the "organ" sounds, melodic chimes in a subway station.
Right before my friends arrived, I was approached by two tourists, a lovely asian woman and her (middle aged) daughter. They produced a map, jabbed an emphatic finger at where they wanted to be, and asked me, in effect, how to get there. I told them, using my best tour-guide demeanor, that they should walk down Vassar, and moreover, one of the side benefits of such a route is that they'd walk by MIT's new Stata Center, see Frank Gehry's latest. "Who's Frank Gehry," the grandmother asked. "The architect, famous architect, did the Guggenheim in Bilbao," I replied, "you should really see it, plus, it is a great walk, get to see a lot of MIT." This seemed convincing, and they walked off, parting with a sincere "thank you," in the direction I had indicated.
It was, I'll say, a lovely quiet bit of evening, even without the flagpole seranade.
***
In my attempt to see more films from the '70s that couldn't or wouldn't be made today, I had procurred the early Al Pacino vehicle Dog Day Afternoon (1975) from Netflix (Ebert, Camby). Sidney Lumet directed, with a tight budget; lot of great shots inside, framing a very sucessful evocation of claustrophobia and media mania. For those of us, weaned on OJ that believed that media-saturated crimes began after the MTV age had killed the radio star, this film's effective portrayal of a brouhaha was telling. Police helicopters hover next to news choppers, high channel camera men scaled out on the landing skids for a better shot, all the while the police, using green army surplus schoolbuses, pump in a full media contingent, cameras, photographers, notepads and all.
This film is, thoroughly and unabashedly, Al Pacino's. Playing a ruthlessly charismatic "Sonny," and robbing a bank to (it turns out) pay for his gay lover "Leon's" (played with aggrieved camp by Chris Sarandon) sex change operation. This sordid, domestic, plot doesn't overshadow Pacino's white hot rage. He paces, twirling the bank's keys on a metal chain with scarely contained fury, shouting at the assembled officers with the name of the recent police massacre: "ATTICA!" As he strides back in forth, in front of the bank, white hankerchief in one hand, key chain in the other, dishelvelled, straining, you are filled with unremitting awe. This, this is acting! This is electric! You can't take your eyes from Pacino, since he's sparkling, magnetic, the beating heart of this movie. Late in the film, in two phone conversations, filmed one after the other, Pacino pours out his heart to Leon, who effectively betrays him by having the cops listen in, and then hangs up, in disgust, at the ineffective keening of his insensible wife, mother of his children. This is great, intrusive, film-making. Sidney Lumet bores to the heart of the issue, letting us explore someone who is unabashedly complex, a real man, a killer, a lover, someone confused about gender issues, full of bravado, but ultimately aiming just to help.
It goes without saying that they wouldn't make this film today. The relevant issues are a little raw--in our heavily over-focus-grouped Hollywood what actor would dare to play a gay man?--and the performances are too complex, shaded, for the modern jump cut. I can't imagine this movie today, with jump cuts, rock soundtracks, and various heroics; it would be too far from the urgent, cheap, desperate cinema verite of the '70s where stars were still permitted to sweat and suffer.
The film's conclusion, at the airport, was borrowed, slightly, by the masterful Michael Mann film Heat (1995), a cops and robbers film that ultimately recognized craft as the token of respect between professionals for whom the career meant everything. Pacino's cop, in Heat, pursues DeNiro to LAX, and in the shifting, liminal space between city and air, nationality and freedom, light and dark, kills him.
Violence at airports--we instinctively understand they're appropriate places to end protean narratives--and Lumet delivers, even recruiting Lance Henriksen, chiseled and largely immovable features, for a contributing cameo. Lance achieves fame, a relative term, for an experienced character actor, in James Cameron's Aliens as an android. That's an effective use of that face.
Dog Day Afternoon: highly recommended.
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