So this is Henry…

A reader directed me to a review of Barfly, the 1987 movie referred to by Roger Ebert as “one of the year’s best films.” Thank you. I did not know about the screenplay. For those too young or too out of it (like me) to remember, Barfly was about a guy named Henry, described by Ebert in this way: “a drunk who is sometimes also a poet. The day bartender hates him, probably for the same reason all bartenders in gutter saloons hate their customers: It's bad enough that they have to serve these losers, without taking a lot of lip from them, too.” One day Henry hooks up with Wanda (Faye Dunaway), another time he hangs (well, rests in a reclining position) with a publisher. The two women meet each other in the bar. They don’t like each other. That’s basically it. The movie is not heavy on plot. But Ebert writes:

“The result is a truly original American movie, a film like no other, a period of time spent in the company of the kinds of characters Saroyan and O'Neill would have understood, the kinds of people we try not to see, and yet might enjoy more than some of our more visible friends.”

Yes well, in case I haven’t been all too obvious about it, Henry is really “Hank,” and “Hank” wrote the screenplay. About this, Ebert says:

“Louis Armstrong was trying to explain jazz one day, and he finally gave up and said, "There are some folks that, if they don't know, you can't tell 'em." The world of Charles Bukowski could be addressed in the same way. Bukowski is the poet of Skid Row, the Los Angeles drifter who spent his life until age 50 in an endless round of saloons and women, all of them cheap, expensive, bad or good in various degrees. "Barfly," based on his original screenplay, is a grimy comedy about what it might be like to spend a couple of days in his skin - a couple of the better and funnier days, although they aren't exactly a lark.”

BTW, Barfly did NOT come up on the list of movies I would most like to see (earlier blog today). You’d think the survey would have asked “is there any person you’ve come across recently whose work you find intriguing?” Instead, it asked about sleep. That’s too subtle. No point in beating around the bush. Might as well ask outright – what kind of movie do you have in mind for tonight? A brooding flick about a poet on skid row, or something set in Salzburg with a lot of music, tons of longueurs and costumes made of drape fabric?