Tropic Of Cancer (1970) Henry Miller Black Comedy Noir

                                                 "A "Proto Bukowski" Neo Noir Drama" (Noirsville)

Directed by Joseph Strick (The Savage Eye, Justine, Road Movie). 

Written by Joseph Strick and Betty Botley and based on Henry Miller's autobiographical novel. The beautiful cinematography was by Alain Derobe, music was by Stanley Myers.

The film stars Rip Torn (Baby Doll, A Face in The Crowd, Pork Chop Hill, Sweet Bird of Youth, The Cincinnati Kid, Crazy Joe, Man In Black) as Henry Miller, Ellen Burstyn (The Last Picture Show, Requiem For A Dream) (uncredited) as Mona Miller, James T. Callahan (All Fall Down, Experiment In Terror) as Fillmore, David Baur as Carl, Laurence Lignères as Ginette, Phil Brown (The Killers, Johnny O'Clock, Moonrise, The Hidden Room, Valdez Is Coming) as Van Norden, Dominique Delpierre as Vite Cheri, Magali Noël (Rififi, Amacord, La Dolce Vita, Des femmes disparaissent) as The Princess, Raymond Gérôme as M. Le Censeur, Ginette Leclerc as Madame Hamilton, Sabine Sun as Elsa, Sheila Steafel as Tania. Gladys Berry as American Lady, George Birt as Sylvester, Stuart de Silva as Ranji, Steve Eckardt as Cronstadt, Philippe Gasté as Train Passenger, Gisèle Grimm as Germaine, Eléonore Hirt as Yvette, Jo Lefevre as Accordionist, Françoise Lugagne as Iréne, Edward Marcus as Boris, Henry Miller as Spectator, Christine Oscar as Helen, and Elliott Sullivan as Peckover

This is Henry Miller's Tropic of Cancer 1934 autobiographical novel transposed to a 1969 Paris. The original novel was banned in the U.S., a good clue that this is a "Noir" tale, and would certainly be considered one in the original French coinage of the term. If you don't know what I'm taking about and think Film Noir started in Hollywood, find out all about the real story  here.

This could easily fit on a double bill with Tales of Ordinary Madness..

Story 

We see a sprinkling bidet with the last of the titles "directed by Joseph Strick" dissolve into a similarly sprinkling Paris fountain, visual foreshadowing. This got completely lost on the negative critics in 1970. One guy says from the bidet it was all downhill.

There's a whole portion of humanity that just can't deal with sex. It's a fearful subject and in 1970 the Sexual Revolution was just picking up speed. The established media was lagging behind. In the U.S. we just lived through the Cuban Missel Crisis and were still bogged down in Vietnam.  

"You had to have been there. The 1960s. I was a kid growing up in NYC. You couldn't help but get the feeling that you were living in the biggest bullseye on the planet. If anyplace was destined for the sobriquet "Ground Zero" it was Manhattan. The Cold War was about to boil over. The Cuban Missile Crisis and reactions to it had a way of focusing anxiety.

I remember doing nuclear attack drills in school. A bell would go off and we'd all hunker down under our desks, as if that was going to be any help. I sure that this was the spark that really ignited the counterculture revolution. It got slapped into overdrive. The supposed "grown-ups" were totally fucking nuts. 

If we don't shuck off all this institutional bull shit fast we may never enjoy life. If it feels go do it, and if you don't "do it" now you may never get to do it. We who went out, stopped worrying and "did it" all owe a big thanks to all the politico wackos of the world." (Noirsville)

That's the Zeitgeist of where this film is coming from. 

So Strick, in this re imagined version, tells us that Miller is still the struggling author, in present time 1969 Paris, broke and bumming off his French friends and his fellow expatriate American artists and bohemians. 

From the bidet to fountain we get Millers V.O., some Paris establishing shots. eventually we are spying Miller approaching a cafe. 

Henry Miller [V.O.]: This, then, this is not a movie. This is a libel, slander, defamation of character, a prolonged insult, a gob of spit in the face of art, a kick in the pants to God, man, destiny, time, love, beauty, what you will. I'm going to sing for you. A little off-key perhaps, but I will sing. I will sing while you croak. I will dance over your dirty corpse.

At the Cafe Miller starts bumming his friends for money. 

Henry Miller: Could you loan me five francs to take a taxi to St. Lazare? Now, you know Mona. If I'm not there to meet the boat train, she's liable to turn right around and go back.

Searching for Mona

He gets enough to meet the boat train and eventually runs into Mona who is seated at a table waiting for him. Mona is obviously glad to see him and is apparently very horny. She wants to go to a hotel immediately. 

Ellen Burstyn as Mona

But Miller needs more francs for a hotel so he bums more money from another buddy sitting at an outdoor table.. 

With enough cash Miller brings Mona to a flea bag called the Select Hotel. When they get to the room they go at it on the bed immediately. Mona asks if she could take her dress off, Miller tells her no. 

 

They make more love. Between sessions Mona tells him that she went to an audition for a part that she was just great for but they gave it to a friend of the producer or playwright, it's nothing important though. What's important is their need for each other in that moment.

Rip Torn as Henry Miller

The next morning they both wake up with crabs. Mona is extremely disgusted and demands that they get another hotel.  

Its a humorous sequence as we watch the both of them walking down the streets of Paris itching and scratching their way to another higher class hotel.

Once in the room, Mona even pulls down the bedclothes and inspects the sheets of their bed while the hotel chambermaid is there, making sure there are no bugs. 

They both take showers and spend the night. But early in the morning Mona packs, sneaks out and heads back to the boat train.

Miller hears her depart, but pretends he's still asleep. He can't afford her there anyway without a income. So Miller wanders around trying to figure out what to do. 

 

We follow Miller as he makes the rounds looking for pals and gals. We watch as he passes an outdoor market and watch him steal a tomato. He eats it as he walks along. 

So while walking Miller devises a plan where fixes it so that one day a week he's having dinner and a place to crash with each of his expatriate friends. He correctly figures he'll not be overstaying his welcome if he rotates through them. He also tells us that he has enough expatriate friends that he can weed out the ones who become pain in the asses.

From here on out its the tale of Miller's attempts at staying afloat in "Noirsville," rotating through his friends, taking various jobs that come along, (his stint at a boys school teaching English is a hoot). We also see how he takes advantage of each of his friends, and they of him, in all their various misadventures in love and relationships. 

Nix this couple, they hypothetically keeps track of the cost of the food he eats....

Nix this guy he has overly friendly dogs

Nix the Music lover

Oui to friend with benefits Tania the ballet dancer Sheila Steafel.

George Britt as Sylvester Tania's playwright husband

The Princess (Magali Noël) and Fillmore (James T. Callahan)

David Baur as Carl

Noirsville 

Stuart de Silva as Ranji

[Last lines]

Henry Miller: [V.O.] My thoughts drift out toward the sea, toward the other side, where taking a last look back, I had seen the skyscrapers fading out in a flurry of snowflakes. I see them looming up again, in the same ghostly way as when I left, see the lights creeping through their ribs, and see the whole city spread out from Harlem to the Battery, the streets chocked with ants, the theatres empty. I wonder, in a vague way, whatever happened to my wife. After everything quietly sifted through my head, a great peace came over me. Here, where the river gently winds through the girdle of the hills lies a soil so saturated with the past that however far back the mind roams, one can never detach it from its human background. Christ. Before my eyes, there shimmers such a golden peace that only a neurotic could dream of turning his head away. So quietly flows the Seine, that one hardly notices its presence. It is always there, quiet and unobtrusive, like a great artery running through the human body. In the wonderful peace that falls over me, it seems as if I've climbed to the top of a high mountain. For a little while, I will be able to look around me to take in the meaning of the landscape. Human beings make a strange fauna and flora. From a distance, they appear negligible; close up, they're apt to appear ugly and malicious. More than anything, they need to be surrounded with *sufficient* space. Space even more than time. The sun is setting. I feel this river flowing through me. It's past. It's ancient soil. The changing climate. The hills gently girdle it about. Its course is fixed.

I wasn't expecting much but was pleasantly surprised by how entertaining a film Strick has crafted. All the actors are exceptionally good, the situations and predicaments are titillatingly out there, but still tasteful and intelligent. 

There are whole sequence where Rip Torn just V.O.'s actual passages from Miller's autobiographical novel. Bravo! 9/10

The reason it's not better know is because it laughingly was originally rated X in the United States. Thank the censors for it's obscurity. 

"THIS is not a movie," announces Rip Torn at the beginning and as the author-protagonist of "Tropic of Cancer." He's wrong. It is a highly interesting one, and definitely not for everybody. 

Produced, directed and co-adapted by Joseph Strick, the Paramount release opened yesterday ever so aptly, at the Paris Theater. Is the movie like Henry Miller's book? Yes, in essence, spirit and flavor. Remarkably so. Yes, good old "Tropic of Cancer," Miller's candid underground diary-novel of his rootless, libertine sojourn in France during the early 1930's, which was long banned in this country, has finally made it to the screen when anything now goes for sensation or elusive art. 

The picture is neither. With extraordinary alacrity, technical skill and plain common sense, Strick (and Betty Botley, his colleague) has lifted Miller's rambling, sizzling narrative off the printed page and shaped a vibrantly blunt and lifelike eyeful that either follows or suggests the original, retaining most of the key characters and situations. Add a brilliantly right personification of Miller by Rip Torn, whose labyrinthine wanderings about Paris are superbly evoked by the beautiful color photography of Alain de Robe. Add (straight from the book) the frankest and the filthiest flow of expletives, Anglo-Saxon and otherwise, ever to spew forth from a commercial, publicly shown movie feature, on these shores, at least. Wearying as the barrage becomes, the shock is acoustical, not visual. For all the blistering language, in a movie whose hero's primary concern is sex there is only a smattering or semi-clad, amorous intertwining and some casual, frontal female nudity.

Another curiosity wrought by Strick is that the setting of the original, which was indelibly stamped with the nineteen-thirties of expatriate Americans, has been so subtly updated to the present as to be hardly noticeable. This becoming touch adds dimension, if not real stature, which is where Strick's towering transition of Joyce's "Ulysses" has it all over "Tropic of Cancer."Even with the splendid performances of the entire cast, with a freshness of comparatively unknown faces in the featured roles, the film succeeds best on the level of a comic, sexual adventure of a man obsessed and motivated by one thing .On this level of lust, for about two-thirds of the way, the picture is brazenly sly, boldly fatalistic and often hilarious, all of it mirrored in the face of the curly haired Torn, with his bland drawl and piercing eyes. In a mercurial rhythm of tight sparse images the camera lets Torn rip, as he wheedles cash and lodging from a group of friends, seducing and re-seducing, eyeing wives, mistresses and new quarries, and lending a friendly, lascivious ear to the sexual hang-ups of his pals.

The acting, and acting it is, remains unflawed by a cast that includes Ellen Burstyn, David Bauer, Phil Brown, Ginette LeClerc, Dominique Delpierre, Giselle Grimm, Magali Noel and others. Miller himself appears for a second inside a crowded church. But the picture loses routing toward the end, when it casually but purposefully involves the hero in the plight of a homesick, neurotic pal, memorably played by James Callahan, and his fiery mistress, a comely brunette named Laurence Ligneres. This closing chapter also was in a summary philosophy, from Miller's mouthpiece, an exuberantly defiant stream-of-consciousness about a lone man against the world. Torn speaks it at the fade-out, standing in an open taxi, in a retreating camera shot that suggests a suspended head crossing the Seine on a straight level. Intended or not, this is the definitive image of Miller's high life that Strick has transplanted with such surprising, practical fidelity. It is all effect, not substance, a soulless business anchored to the groin, with no simple warmth or feeling and no real body, although Torn states his case clearly enough: "Above all—the ecstasy. "When the movie runs out of steam, it leaves only a shiftless, conventionally cynical and foul-mouthed bucko who couldn't matter less, even with mouth closed.

TROPIC OF CANCER, directed by Joseph Strick; screenplay by Mr. Strick and Betty Botley, based on the book by Henry Miller; photography by Alain de Robe; music by Stanley Myers; produced by Mr. Strick; distributed by Paramount Pictures. At the Paris Theater, 58th Street off Fifth Avenue. Running time: 84 minutes. (The Motion Picture Association of America's Production Code and Rating Administration classifies this film "X—no one under 17 admitted".)  (NY Times Feb. 20, 1970)