John Fante’s slim 1939 novel Ask the Dust, one of four autobiographical novels about his surrogate, Arturo Bandini, has a childlike lyricism that recalls William Saroyan and Jack Kerouac. “I climbed out the window and scaled the incline to the top of Bunker Hill. A night for my nose, a feast for my nose, smelling the stars, smelling the flowers, smelling the desert, and the dust asleep, across the top of Bunker Hill. The city spread out like a Christmas tree, red and green and blue. Hello, old houses, beautiful hamburgers singing in cheap cafes, Bing Crosby singing too.”
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The depth and intensity of Fante’s autocritique are missing from writer-director Robert Towne’s sexy, sensual, romantic, nostalgic adaptation of the novel, a labor of love he’s been trying to realize for years—he discovered the book while researching Chinatown, his most famous script. Towne isn’t blind to Bandini’s self-deception, but since this is a Hollywood romance, he has to spend most of the movie cozying up to the audience, which includes romanticizing Bandini (Colin Farrell) and the waitress, Camilla Lopez (Salma Hayek), as well as downplaying Bandini’s troubled Catholicism and the virginity he loses to a Jewish-American woman he doesn’t love.
But to Towne’s credit, he’s a thoughtful and conscientious romantic. He skillfully makes the two main characters a hot, volatile couple, deftly staging their courtship as if it were an erotic grudge match. During this period Fante was supported by H.L. Mencken, who was publishing him in the American Mercury. The novel calls Mencken J.C. Hackmuth, and it’s perfectly reasonable that Towne removes that disguise. (When Mencken briefly wrests the voice-over from Bandini, his words are spoken by Time film critic Richard Schickel.)
I’m reminded of “Big Jim” Folsom, who served as governor of Alabama twice, in the late 40s and mid-50s, and who presided over blatant graft and corruption. But this grandstanding, alcoholic clown also invited Harlem congressman Adam Clayton Powell to have a drink in the governor’s mansion—a radical gesture for a southern politician at the time—and took progressive stands on women’s and voting rights issues. He seems much more morally ambiguous than a hypocritical racial agitator like George Wallace, and he was arguably an honest crook worthy of not just scorn but admiration. Find Me Guilty suggests, with a clear sense of irony, that the notorious “Jackie Dee” can be read the same way.
Directed and written by Robert Towne
With Colin Farrell, Salma Hayek, Idina Menzel, Donald Sutherland, Eileen Atkins, and William Mapother
Find Me Guilty ★★★ (A must see)
Directed by Sidney Lumet
Written by Lumet, T.J. Mancini, and Robert J. McCrea
With Vin Diesel, Ron Silver, Peter Dinklage, Linus Roache, Tim Cinnante, Annabella Sciorra, Raul Esparza, and Alex Rocco
