Month: August 2017

In a Dream of Strange Cities, Part One: Farewell, “Jean” Moreau

Text by Rick Ouellette, photos are archival except where indicated

When the iconic French actress Jeanne Moreau died last month, I’m sure most obituaries ignored her work in the 1955 film M’sieur la Caille, while lauding her performances in such classics as Jules and Jim and Diary of a Chambermaid. Known in the States (if it was known at all) as No Morals, it seems from the trailer to be at least a half-serious film about the shadowy world of prostitutes and gangsters. It’s even called an “art film” by the YouTuber who posted the trailer. But listen to the titillating, oversold narration that goes with the American sneak preview and you quickly realize this is just the sort of movie that could be peddled across the Atlantic as a sex film in the days before the large-scale production of straight pornography.

When No Morals landed in Boston, a few years before I was born twenty miles away, it was at the since-demolished State Theatre at a prime downtown location at the corner of Washington and Boylston Streets. The top photo is one of a series of images I gleaned from Google that taken together suggest the continual architectural and social transfiguration of an urban center over a century and a half. Going back that far, we find the original venue on that spot was Beethoven Hall. I love that name but by scanning that ads they ran (several are up on Wiki Commons) the programming had little to do with Ludwig Van and a lot to do with late 19th century diversions. There were comic operas, freak shows, minstrel singers and even Greco-Roman wrestling. If there were such a thing as a time-travel bucket list, I would pencil in “The Great English Mesmerist” Annie de Montford and her “amusing entertainments of psychology.”

Even better would be a time-lapse view of the historical transformation of just that one site. The first change came in 1879 when Henry E. Abbey, owner of the Park Theatre in New York, comprehensively re-built Beethoven Hall and named it the same as his Gotham property. The elegant interior space continued for years with the parade of comedies and singing shows under a number of different proprietors, one of whom was none other than Lotta Crabtree. Once dubbed “The Nation’s Darling”, Lotta started in showbiz as a girl in California Gold Rush country after being recognized by Lola Montes for her singing and dancing skills and comedic personality. By the time she migrated to Boston and took over the Park, she was one of America’s wealthiest and most popular performers. So popular in fact, that she felt the need to construct a private tunnel that went from the theater’s basement to the nearby hotel where she lived. Crabtree was also a philanthropist and some of her Boston charities still operate today, 93 years after her death.


I like Lotta a lotta: Ms. Crabtree in the 1870s.

What is less charitable is the fate of the Park Theatre in the years afterward. The playhouse gradually got into the burlesque business (the only local establishment to ever host a Gypsy Rose Lee striptease), then found use as a B-movie cinema as the once-impressive horseshoe shaped interior likely faded and it became The State. The racy fare showing here in a mixed urban tableau pre-dates (but not by much) the city-sanctioned red light district commonly known as the Combat Zone. By the time those lines of demarcation were drawn up, the State Theatre fit snugly up in the Zone’s northwest corner and was showing X-rated features one after another daily.

A forensic study of the top photo displays a transitory peek into an age that was already vestigial by the time I moved to Boston no more than two decades later. The 600 block of Washington Street is a vibrant jumble of visual cues: a second-floor bowling and billiards joint; a pizza joint with a delightfully off-kilter sign, two Civil Defense fallout shelter markers and, to the left of the theater, the Crabtree office building (the name is probably not a co-incidence) featuring the Progressive Clothing shop, where some nice suits can be seen hanging on a rack in the window.

That makes sense because the people on the sidewalk are so nicely dressed in the “Mad Men” style of the day. Even the guy in the outside ticket booth has a suit and tie. Under the boldly projecting marquee, anyone could have a nice look-see at the poster for The Shocking Set (where “men were playthings”!!) or the one for “No Morals” where Jean (sic) Moreau, although she’s probably just looking for love in all the wrong places, is claimed to have “many men on the string.” This double billing seems to suggest some early strain of erotic feminism. It’s a notion may have caught the attention of the shifty-eyed lady in the white coat who is suspiciously close to the ticket booth—if so, that would explain her assumed husband’s sheepish grin. Nudge, nudge, wink, wink!


Photo by author

By the time this era (and area) was replaced by the more openly raunchy Combat Zone, the marquee didn’t even bother with titles, never mind enticing phrases, it usually said something like “Continuous Adult Films XXX Shown Daily.” In 1990, the State Theatre was razed in the process of yet another (and current) transformation, brought on by civic improvement (though home video and the Internet had a lot to do with moving the sex industry off the street grid), university expansions and Ayn Randian real estate power grabs. In the photo above, taken on an early Sunday morning in 2016, the State Theatre would have been between the Cathay Bank and the CVS store on the right, part of the blank back wall of a Ritz Carlton complex. At this same spot fifty years ago, you would have been looking out onto maybe twenty theater marquees, and not just the naughty stuff. As lower Washington St. was one edge of Chinatown there wer kung-fu flicks and Stanley Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey played at a now-defunct movie palace where now is the barren frontage of the building on the left. If I live long enough, even this view will become a complete stranger to me.

With No Morals sadly unavailable, my Jeanne Moreau tribute viewing was 1957’s Elevator to the Gallows, the taut film-noir that was Louis Malle’s first major work and a sort of springboard for the actresses’ later exaltation. Moreau is uncommonly beautiful and tersely soulful as the wife of an industrialist who conspires with her lover, one of her husband’s top men, to murder him. The scheme gets foiled when, unbeknownst to her, lover boy gets trapped in a lift. Confused and upset but still imperious, Moreau’s character—her world suddenly upended—famously wanders thru a shifting Parisian streetscape to the Miles Davis’ haunting score, in a fruitless search, lost as if moving thru a dream of a place she thought you once knew. How I relate.

Tu Dors Nicole: Wide Awake in the Lost Summer of the Soul

Tu Dors Nicole
Directed and written by Stephane Lafleur—2014—93 minutes

When it comes to summer movies nowadays, thoughts quickly turn to the long parade of loud and hyperactive superhero movies or maybe the unforgiving clatter of the latest Michael Bay-directed cinematic miscarriage (I bet the sixth installment of the Transforrners series will arrive right on schedule in July 2019). In today’s movie-going world of attention-deficit editing and heavy metal decibel levels, endured from a reclining seat at your local multiplex, it seems more gratifying than ever that anyone would make a film like the minimalist, achingly felt and lovingly rendered Tu Dors Nicole (“Nicole, You’re Sleeping”). This is a summer movie in the sense that the season itself seems to be a main character. This quiet Quebec indie moves slowly to the rhythms and rituals of the dog days. But against the humid backdrop of mini-golf, bike rides, soft serve ice cream and swimming pools, there plays out a piquant drama of an insomniac young woman trying to shift her life out of the neutral gear that people often find themselves in between late adolescence and full adulthood.

Nicole (Julianne Cote) is a serious, freckle-faced woman in her early twenties, living at home and working in a large thrift store in an unnamed provincial town. As high summer approaches, and with her parents gone on an extended vacation, she leafs through the mail in the shade of the backyard. While a harp is gently plucked on the soundtrack, her face lights up as she opens an envelope containing her very first credit card. Her friend Veronique (a soft-featured blonde played by Catherine St-Laurent) jokingly asks if she should now call her bestie “Madam.” But it’s quickly apparent that Nicole, still not grown all the way up, is destined to dream-walk straight on through August—except for the fact that she can’t seem to get to sleep.


The duo of Catherine St-Laurent (left as Veronique) and Julianne Cote (as Nicole) is not dissimilar to the pairing of Scarlett Johansson and Thora Birch in the Terry Zwigoff film “Ghost World.”

In the film’s opening scene, a restless Nicole rises from the bed of her one-night stand to take her leave at dawn. When the guy informs her “You’re hard to follow” after she politely declines his offer for more “fun” (“We already had fun”) it feels instinctively that both are right. Maybe she just needs some time to think her way forward but that becomes a lot more difficult when she discovers her 30-ish brother Remi (Marc-Andre Grondin) has moved back in with his indie-rock trio in tow. Setting up in the parents’ bourgeois living room, they seemed determined to spend the summer in unproductive rehearsals and obsessive sound-level adjustments. In the outdoors, the girls go through the motions of what used to be the carefree, lazy days of school vacation. After tallying up the score following a round of putt-putt, Veronique allows that “This used to be more fun.” Martin, a neighborhood boy of about twelve with a prematurely deep voice, provides some comic relief but also represents the film’s emotional center, with his strangely mature but nonetheless charming crush on Nicole. “The heart has no age,” he confidently tells her, adding; “You can’t deny love forever.” These words will linger even when Nicole and Veronique hastily plan a getaway trip to Iceland on the credit card.


Nicole and her young suitor Martin having a heart-to-heart at the ice cream stand.

Despite its minimalist methodology, many veteran watchers of indie films should find it quite easy to fall under this work’s unassuming spell. The talented cast is spot-on and Lafleur’s assured direction is complemented by the radiant Zone System cinematography and imaginative, almost Lynchian sound design. “Tu Dors Nicole” is a feast for the senses (esp. in the Blu-ray version that I watched) and you can almost feel the summer heat shimmering off the screen. And although it’s more of a snack when it comes to the emotional content, the film ends up being quite affecting in its own muted way. Inevitably, the girls’ friendship is put to the test (“We’re like an old couple,” Nicole tells her brother’s drummer, with whom she shares a fleeting mutual attraction) and at the end of it all comes the expected nudge off the stasis point. After blowing off steam like the Icelandic geysers she’s intended on visiting, it’s time for Nicole step off that spot and into the adulthood where most of life’s real adventures will take place.