Ah Sloppy Sue and Big Bones Billie they’ll be comin’ up for air…

[Photo Credit: Girls LOVE Sex Too]

David Remnick has a long profile on Bruce Springsteen in the New Yorker:

Early this year, Springsteen was leading rehearsals for a world tour at Fort Monmouth, an Army base that was shut down last year; it had been an outpost since the First World War of military communications and intelligence, and once employed Julius Rosenberg and thousands of militarized carrier pigeons. The twelve-hundred-acre property is now a ghost town inhabited only by steel dummies meant to scare off the ubiquitous Canada geese that squirt a carpet of green across middle Jersey. Driving to the far end of the base, I reached an unlovely theatre that Springsteen and Jon Landau, his longtime manager, had rented for the rehearsals. Springsteen had performed for officers’ children at the
Fort Monmouth “teen club” (dancing, no liquor) with the Castiles, forty-seven years earlier.

The atmosphere inside was purposeful but easygoing. Musicians stood onstage noodling on their instruments with the languid air of outfielders warming up in the sun. Max Weinberg, the band’s volcanic drummer, wore the sort of generous jeans favored by dads at weekend barbecues. Steve Van Zandt, Springsteen’s childhood friend and guitarist-wingman, keeps up a brutal schedule as an actor and a d.j., and he seemed weary, his eyes drooping under a piratical purple head scarf. The bass player Garry Tal-lent, the organist Charlie Giordano, and the pianist Roy Bittan horsed around on a roller-rink tune while they waited. The guitarist Nils Lofgren was on the phone, trying to figure out flights to get back to his home, in Scottsdale, for the weekend.

Springsteen arrived and greeted everyone with a quick hello and his distinctive cackle. He is five-nine and walks with a rolling rodeo gait. When he takes in something new—a visitor, a thought, a passing car in the distance—his eyes narrow, as if in hard light, and his lower jaw protrudes a bit. His hairline is receding, and, if one had to guess, he has, over the years, in the face of high-def scrutiny and the fight against time, enjoined the expensive attentions of cosmetic and dental practitioners. He remains dispiritingly handsome, preposterously fit. (“He has practically the same waist size as when I met him, when we were fifteen,” says Steve Van Zandt, who does not.) Some of this has to do with his abstemious inclinations; Van Zandt says Springsteen is “the only guy I know—I think the only guy I know at all—who never did drugs.” He’s followed more or less the same exercise regimen for thirty years: he runs on a treadmill and, with a trainer, works out with weights. It has paid off. His muscle tone approximates a fresh tennis ball. And yet, with the tour a month away, he laughed at the idea that he was ready. “I’m not remotely close,” he said, slumping into a chair twenty rows back from the stage.

Here’s a good Bruce cover…

Clarence Clemons died yesterday and the world is smaller for it.

It’s the emmis, man.

This is one tune of his that I love:

And here is a 1975 newspaper article on the Boss by our pal John Schulian.

In one of Burt Lancaster’s finest roles he had the misfortune, and then the great fortune, to go head-to-head for the audience’s affection with Susan Sarandon’s lemons.

Louis Malle’s Atlantic City (1980) traces the decay and rebirth of a city and a man as Lou (Burt Lancaster), an aged one-bit-hood who’s sniffed but never tasted a life of crime, bumbles his way into his beautiful neighbor’s screwed-up life. That neighbor is Sally (Susan Sarandon), and her daily work in a casino oyster bar leads to the ritual cleansing of her bare breasts and arms with lemon juice each night. Watching the painstakingly thorough application of said juice through Sally’s kitchen window, we share a voyeur’s perch with Lou from his darkened room next door. Thus begins our identification with Lou–through our common depravity.

The first fifteen minutes spread out silently, setting the plot and place like a gentle ocean wave lapping the shoreline. Such sustained quiet in a film is striking in its own right, but all the more unlikely when you realize it was written by a playwright. This is John Guare’s only attempt at conceiving a project explicitly for the silver screen, and you wonder if he just got bored with the medium because it came so naturally to him.

Louis Malle has juxtaposed much of the opening action with scenes of demolished and decayed buildings. Old Atlantic City was razed and rebuilt with the legalization of gambling in 1976, a metamorphosis etched in the lines of Lou’s rumpled suits. Gone is the city’s axis of organized crime, replaced by the glitz of the legal jackpot and the free-for-all drug trade. Lou is just another decrepit structure, waiting for the wrecking ball. Watching Lou running numbers through the poverty stricken parts of town, or trying to hock a shamefully stolen cigarette case, he seems outside of time–like a guy selling Christmas trees in May.

As Lou shuffles around town enduring a series of humiliations, Burt Lancaster is not “mugging” in any scene. There’s no winking to the audience, reminding us not to confuse Lou with Burt. This is an actor finding the most pathetic corners of his soul and exposing them for us to judge.

Because Lancaster gives such an honest performance, he takes the audience to wildly unexpected places. Lou descends into his gangster fantasy, enabled by the accidentally successful execution of a drug deal that lines his pockets for a few days, and he takes us along for the ride. As the character Lou becomes more and more deluded, the actor infuses him with a noticeable heft and vigor. He straightens his back. He moves more gracefully and charm starts to ooze in his every utterance. He’s bluffing everybody, including the audience, and we should know better because we know what he’s holding.

His bluff works best on Sally – who’s been blindsided by the unexpected return and violent death of her estranged husband Dave. Actually, estranged doesn’t cover it – he ran off with her kid sister, knocked her up and returned to peddle some stolen dope from her home. What’s the word for that? When Lou extends a knowing, comforting, wealthy-looking hand to her, she’s in no position to question the help. The irony, of course, is that Lou’s holding Dave’s drugs and money, sucking Sally right back into the drama surrounding her dead husband.

Lou has been watching gansters all his life, and now that the time has come to play the part, he grabs it with both hands. He wraps the mist of illusion around them so tightly, we can almost believe their love scene. Maybe for a minute. Which is all Malle and Guare give to them.

Physical violence ends the charade. When thugs push Lou aside to attack Sally, he crumples in the corner. The curve returns to his spine as if crushed by the weight of reality. And we realize what we’ve endorsed thus far is nothing more than a cheap veil covering a rotten dream.

Lou realizes it too, just in the nick of time to salvage what passes for a happy ending. He’s got to extricate Sally from the mess he’s created. And though he’d rather high-tail it on the first bus out of town than face the actual danger he’s stirred up, she drags him into the fight where he’s got to pull the trigger to save them both. All the typical positive outcomes are flipped on their heads. Success would be murder. Happiness would be an appearance on a wanted poster. That’s how it ends in Atlantic City.

***

It’s hard to believe that the Bruce Springsteen’s “Atlantic City” was not conceived for, or at least in reference to, this film. It shows how accessible these themes were at this time around this place. Still, they mingle in my mind as one extended meditation. A terrific companion to the movie, whether or not they have any other than the title in common.