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Lenny Bruce at San Francisco's Basin Street West Club in 1965, the penultimate gig. "This is not a documentary. It is a performance." The stage is a seedy combination of grotto and dungeon, the spotlight is dim, the vantage point is from a table in the front row. "Dirty Lenny" comes on and promptly starts gnawing on the politics of obscenity that have left him puffy, bankrupt, and wobbly with paranoia. The draining "comedy of errors" of trials and dirty words, the search for "redeeming social co-ordinance," the mangling of comic bits for the forbidden profanity in them. Celebrated routines are trotted out, half-heartedly—the Warner Brothers prison drama with Barry Fitzgerald and Sabu, Mrs. Roosevelt's knockers, "How the Jew and the Negro Got Into Show Business" all make piddling appearances to sparse laughter. Bruce's true concern is in his legal martyrdom, his props are the manuscript from his latest ordeal in court and the audience in the dark standing in for the jury. "In the Halls of Justice, the only justice is in the halls." Capturing the controversial needler's doleful final stage, John Magnuson's depressing, invaluable record illustrates a performer's shift from stand-up observation to philosophical obsession. Spent yet still burning, Bruce keeps the scratchy act going before vanishing behind the curtain: The jumpy hipsterisms and the quicksilver, Yiddish-peppered vocal swings are still there, though the schtick now plays more like snatches from Kafka's A Hunger Artist. (The filming is concurrent with Penn's Mickey One.) Unquestionably a key source of study for Fosse's film. In black and white.
--- Fernando F. Croce |