Put the intoxicating Lara Flynn Boyle in a long, elegant, satin evening gown worthy of Grace Kelly playing a princess–enhanced with tempting decolletage and long, elegant white gloves. Drape her across a divan with someone singing the lush, old torch song “Remind Me” to piano accompaniment in the background, while Boyle ponders the sweetness and meanness of life and, quietly, talks dirty. Garnish her with a smoldering cigarette in a long holder and a Sidecar cocktail, and what do you have?
You have the 1950s.
More particularly, you have a fabulously sinful, true-life movie about one of the most marvelously decadent episodes of the ’50s: the denouement of oleomargarine heir and randy-dandy playboy Mickey Jelke.
The movie is “Cafe Society,” made for next-to-nothing in a defunct Manhattan gentleman’s club and starring Boyle, Peter Gallagher and Frank Whaley. It’s the hot word-of-mouth gotta-see film of the New York summer season–now playing at the very hip Screening Room in the TriBeCa neighborhood and nowhere else in the world, though I suspect that will quickly change.
“It’s the most noir film noir I ever made,” Gallagher has said.
Most people think of the 1950s as a truly dorky epoch: saddle shoes, early Elvis, Hula Hoops, Davy Crockett hats, tail fins, duck-and-cover atomic bomb drills, Howdy Doody, Ike, the Army-McCarthy hearings, Snooky Lanson.
There was, to be sure, a lot that was dumb back then. With teen magazines instructing young girls not to say “darn” because it might lead to swearing, the strict moral ethic supposedly ruling the entire nation’s behavior in those years was even more uptight, naive and ridiculous than the one inspiring the boobs of the Republican Party today.
But that image is a lie. The real ’50s were about as much like that as a Rye Manhattan is like an ice cream soda. Or if you will, as Marilyn Monroe and Marlene Dietrich are like Meg Ryan and Julia Roberts.
Written and directed by Raymond De Felitta, who got the idea for the film from reading an ancient copy of Star Detective magazine, “Cafe Society” focuses on an institution of the same name that was unique to the ’50s–and died not long after they expired. There’s been nothing like it since.
“Cafe Society” was literally the society that hung out in cafes–the Stork Club and El Morocco (among glittering others) in New York; the Pump Room and Fritzel’s in Chicago. It was the world of Walter Winchell and Earl Wilson, Sherman Billingsley and Slim Keith, Brenda Frazier and Porfirio Rubirosa.
Money fueled Cafe Society, but it wasn’t the raison d’etre. Unlike the prancing, trashy, trophy wife and junk bond millionaire nouveau society of the 1980s, these people weren’t interested in showing off their bank accounts; they were out for a good time, but not a Shriner’s idea of a good time. They were cool about it, laid-back, worldly wise and world weary.
They included heirs and heiresses, actors and actresses, newsies and press agents, whores and hustlers, swells and sleazebags. There were ladies who behaved like tramps and tramps who tried to behave like ladies. They were so well turned out it was all but impossible to tell them apart–except when one of them might drop a faux pas, as Boyle’s beautiful Patricia Ward does in the film, referring to the “cottages” of Newport, R.I., as “mansions.”
The most notorious of them all was Jelke, a 23-year-old undersized boulevardier and hedonist whose gorgeous first wife was a world-famous courtesan. Irrepressibly played by Whaley–“I’m not a vice lord!” he protests. “I’m not the head of a sex ring! I’m a pervert!”–he becomes engaged to the mesmerizing but low-born Ward, only to have his oleomargarine magnate parents cut him off from his trust fund.
Desperate to maintain his manic, high-priced lifestyle, he persuades fiancee Ward to turn prostitute to support it, but is undone by undercover vice Detective Jack Kale–portrayed by Gallagher in itchy, tormented fashion–who worms his way into the sin set and blows the whistle, only to discover that he likes the lush life and his pose as “a moral guardian” is corrupt.
I’m not revealing a lot to tell you that Jelke did time. It was in all the papers.
But it’s not the plot or the sharp, perfect performances that make this movie so riveting. It’s the rich texture, the constant, gauzy veil of cigarette smoke, the gin and whiskey and Swank Magazine sex, the cabaret songs and 3 a.m. piano, the brittle wit and pithy dialogue, the noir.
“Jump off the moral high horse you’ve been riding and play in the dirt like you really want to do,” Jelke tells Kale.
“You want to live in a cold water flat with our love to keep us warm,” he says to Ward. “It sounds like an afternoon radio play, which is way below your standard of invention.”
“You’re rich, you’re lazy, you’re in the newspapers,” an old cabaret hand tells Jelke. “You’re easy to hate.”
Cafe society wasted away in the 1960s amid such distractions as TV and flower children. Say what you will about these people, but they were grown-ups.
