Word: bellies
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...casus belli is a manuscript compiled by an expatriate American novelist and biographer named Clifford Irving, 41, who lives on the small Balearic island of Ibiza, off Spain's Mediterranean coast. Irving claims that the book is a first-person account of Hughes' life, based on at least 100 hours of interviews with Hughes. The publishers agree with him that the manuscript's authenticity is beyond question. The book, says TIME Inc. President James Shepley, "goes into elaborate detail about the personal and business life of Howard Hughes. It talks about the details of his relationships with women. It talks...
...work as surely as it does the hand of a swashbuckler. One plausible reason given for his escape was that Kaplan had to be returned to the U.S. in order to draw on a multimillion-dollar trust fund. As it happens, the celebrated and ingenious San Francisco lawyer Melvin Belli now has power of attorney over Kaplan's one-third share of the trust fund. Kaplan's sister is a friend of a lawyer in Belli's firm; she' is believed to have been instrumental in making this arrangement...
...help us deal with that complexity by ignoring a number of its main actors, the better to appreciate the intricacies of the remainder. I'm sure. But once you've excised John Jaymes of Young American Enterprises, Sam Cutler, the Dead with their bright ideas, once you've reduced Belli to a harmless comic figure, and the Stones to unwitting spectators of their own spectacle, who's loft but the Angels, and what's left but another melodrama, one in which beefy Alfred Jarrys play the villains, and everyone else the innocents. A self-defined outlaw...
...hope all of this isn't mawkish, but the point is simply that institutional negligence (under which I would classify the callous transgressions of promoters like Lang or Melvin Belli) does not make good copy or flashy movies. When thirty-eight miners suffocate in a mineshaft which doesn't even meet the government's lax specifications, that "tragedy" is accorded the treatment the press gives to earthquakes and other natural disasters, but New York filmmakers aren't about to fly down to Kentucky or wherever and compose a film around it. Instead it's the front page one day, then...
...relation of self to representation, etc., etc. Naturally this is all glitter; what such a schema really does here is allow the filmmakers to cut another slam-bang rock 'n' roll number in every four or five minutes without risking a stylistic break. That way the sequences of Melvin Belli negotiating for the Stones, virtually the only explanation tendered in the entire film concerning who is responsible for what, are not permitted to drag on at "unnecessary" length, a few shots of Belli in his preposterous office deemed sufficient to reveal all, and then again, it's the Angels...