making movies that convinces him to persist in his crazy trade.
Riding with Leo is the old troupe: Buck, Kathleen, and Frank, along with little Alice, who is driving. Most had gone their separate ways until being reunited for the premiere of Griffith’s epic. “Might as well quit. Best damn picture that’s ever going to be made has already been made,” Leo says, referring to The Birth of a Nation. “I’m sick of this racket anyway. Get up at dawn, work all day, every night, six days a week.”
Commiserating with him, Buck quickly agrees, but then Alice spots a glimmer of light in the darkness: a greenhouse converted into a movie studio, in which a World War I adventure is being shot. She stops the car and says, “Look at that,” to which Leo pipes in, wistfully: “They’re shooting a picture.” Shooting a picture—is there a better way to spend a life? As they drive off, they bounce ideas off of each other … the moviemaking will go on, we feel, into the 1920s and perhaps even the 1930s.
In hindsight, both At Long Last Love and Nickelodeon were too self-congratulatory—of Bogdanovich’s success in life, of his exemplary taste in film—to be large successes, but perhaps such a fate was for the best. If they had been hits, would Bogdanovich have ever taken stock and returned with a follow-up as fascinating as Saint Jack? Based on a novel by Paul Theroux, the film is one of Bogdanovich’s finest, owing much to the gritty, unadorned style of Targets. In fact, the films have the same producer, Roger Corman. They share something else, too: a main character worthy of our admiration. Like Byron Orlok in Targets, Jack Flowers (Ben Gazzara) in Saint Jack is a virtuous figure in a corrupt world. Of course, the great irony of the story is that Jack is an American-born pimp who in the latter days of the Vietnam War makes Singapore his home. When we first meet him, Jack seems more like a rogue than a hero—we grin at his endless barking of orders to underlings and superiors alike and his sincere desire that his paying customers have a good time.
But make no mistake: in Jack’s own seedy way, he is as solid, as dependable as Byron Orlok—or Sam the Lion or even John Ford. Jack proves his mettle when a charming CIA agent (Bogdanovich in a devilish performance) offers him $25,000 to surreptitiously photograph an encounter between a muckraking U.S. senator (former James Bond star George Lazenby) and a male prostitute. In a fix and desperate for money—thanks to rival houses of prostitution that have brought his business to an end—Jack goes along with the scheme up to a point but ultimately realizes he cannot go through with it.
Long before the film’s genuinely suspenseful finale, though, we know that Jack is one of the good guys. His qualities are especially evident in the friendship he strikes up with a placid British accountant named William Leigh (Denholm Elliott), whose dreams are so different from Jack’s: William fancies retiring “to a small Georgian house in the West country,” accompanied by his wife and a little pond filled with trout. From their first encounter, Jack handles William kindly—almost gingerly; the Englishman’s rackety cough, heard on the first of his three stops in Singapore, suggests some brewing illness. “What is it—your ticker?” Jack asks, afraid, perhaps, of the answer. Howard Hawks referred to some of his own films as “love affairs between two men,” but no such love affair in a Hawks film was ever as tender as that between Jack Flowers and William Leigh in Saint Jack.
For Jack, William’s certain death spells the end of everything decent. Coursing through the film is a tone of longing and regret. Before Jack is to entrap the senator, he waits in a lobby and looks at a wall of clocks displaying times around the globe—he pauses to ponder the time in New York, his hometown, looking pensive and sad. Even when Jack’s girlfriend of the moment, Monika (Monika Subramaniam), says, upon parting, “I look for you in Ceylon,” it sounds as if she is saying good-bye rather than making a promise for the future. At least Jack has his integrity—as did Bogdanovich, for whom Saint Jack was a comeback in miniature. Although the film was never meant to reach the mass audience that had flocked to The Last Picture Show, What’s Up, Doc?, and Paper Moon, it won over critics and tastemakers—receiving the Critics’ Prize at the Venice Film Festival, for example—and set the stage for the most significant film of Bogdanovich’s career.
On Thanksgiving Eve in 2003, the time flew by, and before I knew it, I told Bogdanovich I had to put a new cassette in my tape recorder. I was prepared to ask one or two more questions and leave it at that.
“I’ll tell you what,” he said, as I fumbled with the machine, “if you want to talk to me some more on another day—that’s okay, you know.”
He almost sounded apologetic.
“When would be convenient for you?” I asked.
“I don’t know. I have some free time tomorrow, basically, but I don’t know how busy you are on Thanksgiving.”
Was he kidding? The stuffing and cranberries could wait—I wanted to talk some more to Peter Bogdanovich.
I told him I was not doing anything special and would be available whenever he was. We set a time. He was beyond solicitous—in fact, he was the easiest, most congenial interview subject I had yet encountered in my short career.
As we were about to hang up, he even managed to make me feel a little less funny about calling him from the bleak, snowy Midwest.
“You’re in Ohio?” he asked.
How did he know? Had his assistant told him?
“Yes,” I said, not volunteering much.
“Where?”
“Columbus.”
He repeated “Columbus”—and all I could think was “how far a-way” it was, as the song goes in the Rodgers and Hammerstein musical South Pacific.
But he went on: “There’s a nice theater marquee there. We used it in Noises Off. I didn’t go there, but they went and shot it for me. So I haven’t been to your hometown.”
He was referring to the Ohio Theatre, a 1920s-era movie palace in downtown Columbus that still runs prints of old movies in the summer. It was there that I first saw Bringing Up Baby, Stagecoach, Strangers on a Train, and so many others, on glistening 35mm prints—seeing most of them because Peter Bogdanovich had recommended them in books he had written or in interviews he had given. And the Ohio Theatre’s marquee does indeed appear briefly in Noises Off. (You can be sure that I double-checked as soon as we hung up.) I didn’t much care if Peter Bogdanovich had actually been here; what gave me a tiny thrill was that my theater was in one of his films. Two cheers for good old Columbus, Ohio.
He seemed curious about his far-flung fan.
“How old were you when you saw They All Laughed?” he asked.
I couldn’t remember, but I said I might have been about fourteen.
“Where did you see it?”
Was he conducting audience research? I cringed when I had to tell him I didn’t see it in a theater but instead picked it up on videotape—how amateurish!
“How interesting,” he said, mysteriously. “What made you decide to buy it?”
Good question.
“I must have read about it somewhere,” I said, and indeed I had: in an interview with Quentin Tarantino that had appeared some years earlier in the New York Times Magazine. “They All Laughed is a masterpiece, I think,” Tarantino had told the reporter. “It captures a fairy-tale New York. It makes New York look like Paris in the 20’s. It makes you want to live there.”47
The matter resolved, I thanked him again for his time and said how much I looked forward to talking with him again tomorrow—Thanksgiving Day. That’s when he said: “You seem to know the answers to some of this stuff.”
This took me aback. Yes, I had asked questions that I thought he would find engaging and surprising, but they were still questions. And his films left me with oodles of them. I began to think that the man who made them was speaking in a secret language that had little