REVIEW: Kathleen Collins' "The Cruz Brothers and Miss Malloy"
by Dennis Leroy Kangalee
The Cruz Brothers and Miss Malloy
Directed by Kathleen Collins
Starring Randy Ruiz, Lionel Pena, Jose Machado, Sylvia Field, & Ernesto Gonzalez
50 Minutes, 1979
Produced & Released on DVD by Milestone Film & Video
A DVD Review Disc 2 of Losing Ground
The magical, fantastical, and political converge in The Cruz Brothers & Miss Malloy
In 1965-1966 there were about five Black film editors in NYC. The late Kathleen Collins was one of them.
This is revealed in a brisk, yet thorough and enlightening video interview, reflecting upon her life as an academic and filmmaker, that Collins gave in 1982 with the chair of the African-American Studies Department of Indiana State University, Phyllis R. Klotman.
It is included as a bonus feature on Milestone Film & Video’s splendid release of Collins’ masterpiece Losing Ground. I have much admiration for Losing Ground and when I saw it years ago it instantly became one of my favorite films. However, upon seeing Cruz Bothers I thought it was worthwhile to try to write about her debut feature as it set the tone and the seeds for what she and cinematographer Ronald K. Gray would later create with Losing Ground alongside two of our most unique and startling actors, Duane Jones and Bill Gunn.
The Cruz Brothers and Miss Malloy is adapted from Henry H. Roth’s book of the same name; Roth co-wrote the script with Collins although Collins makes it clear that the book and the film are different by merely not including a scriptwriting credit in the film. She declares the author’s book and then herself as the director/producer. It’s an interesting detail as this helps to preserve the two different artworks and grants even more reverence to its original source. It’s a subtly brilliant choice. Not shocking coming from a woman with a background in French literature & film (she pursued her Masters degree in Paris) and coming from a religious background it is not unwieldy to have a different kind of respect for the written word since most religious texts promote the idea that it was The Word that came first (a nod to the devious insecurity of writers ourselves).
Cruz Brothers was Collins’ first feature film and something of an experiment - she desperately wanted to make a film but had never worked with actors, was unsure of what sort of material to develop and wary of being ‘too intimate’ with the work. Being keen to the process of cinematic literary adaptation which she formally studied in France – she decided to remove herself a bit and adapt one of her favorite stories by another writer. With Roth’s help a screenplay was written, about five drafts overall, the final version being hers alone.
The movie was shot in Nyack most likely, a milieu she inhabited with other black cinema lone wolves like Bill Gunn (Collins received support from the Rockland Council of Arts and the Haitian Community Council of Rockland) and she later returned to upstate NY in Losing Ground. As urbane, sophisticated, and aggressive as many of her characters are – they are not city slickers or Woody Allen Upper West Siders - her New York neurotics usually vacillate between the woods and the subway and are often searching for something intangible, an inner freedom of course that can deliver them to an outer one. And to be surrounded by trees instead of asphalt is one step towards freedom for Collins and a major theme of the Cruz Brothers.
The movie is about three orphaned Puerto Rican brothers living on their own, having escaped the concrete jungle of the Bronx, who are hired by a dying Irish-American lady to renovate her mansion. The brothers – Victor, Jose, and Felipe - played without an iota of stereotype or projected ‘white gaze scheming,” ; there is an exquisite awkwardness and charm in their performances—they josh and play ball and engage in Three Stooges antics at times and they are enjoyable to watch. The pizza scene is well worth it just to see a “Back-to-the-Basics” acting scene, brimming with honest moment-to-moment states of being and urgency.
Jose Machado as Felipe is some kind of Moe Howard himself – rotund and aggravated all the time – Lionel Pena plays Jose the good-looking Ladies Man, and Randy Ruiz gives an honest performance as the eldest who communicates with the spirit of their dead father (a criminal we learn), and receives his father’s advice from beyond the grave (voiced warmly with humor and panache by Ernesto Gonzalez). All three brothers have yearnings to express themselves, all budding artists in some way. Victor shadow raps in the film (a motif throughout) and records his thoughts on a reel to reel, he will probably become a writer of some kind; Jose develops an interest in theater (which gets developed as the picture moves on) and the miserable Felipe may not be as cerebral or creative, but he’s definitely on the prowl for something more than an ordinary grind. He’s perpetually concerned about his food and his distrust of people and grandiose ideas implies he’s been hurt the most by their dead father’s previously gallant and valiant gangsterism…which in many ways is like the path of the artist: both ignore and develop rules according to their own needs and desires.
You can’t tell who was or wasn’t a professional ‘actor’ in the film and it works out well for the film’s material which rests on magical realism and poetic naturalism. Sylvia Field superbly plays Miss Malloy like an over-aged, mis-cast, broken East Coast draft of Blanche DuBois. A version Tennessee Williams himself might have gotten rid of and that says a lot – for Miss Malloy’s problem is not only that she is trapped in some kind of past she wished she had but that she knows she is going to die soon. What’s remarkable in retrospect is that this film was made in 1979. Less than ten years later Collins herself would die early of cancer at 46. This first film by a brilliant multi-talented artist and PhD is already infused with the wisdom of old age that the filmmaker never got a chance to even see and yet it sparkles with the ripe passionate yearnings of youth, a true lust for life which she always retained.
There is a free-wheeling tug to Collins’ work – it was honed to perfection in Losing Ground, but here it is rawer and unsteady and that makes it even more attractive to me because it is hard to genuinely promote enthusiasm for life in cinema, especially if you are an intelligent and conscious human being. To celebrate is one of the hardest and highest orders to meet – because it means you will affirm something in this wretchedness called life in spite of its barbarity.
Collins and Bill Gunn both shared an interesting space: they were brainy, righteous middle-class mystics who were well aware of time, history, and present tenses as it informed the ‘Black condition’ in America and abroad but they were also, simply, great aesthetes (“Ice seasons the ginger” is a line Gunn himself might have written).
Collins and Gunn shared a love of slow and ‘still life’ film language that both employed, albeit in different ways. Also Collins was the light to Gunn’s dark, she was McCartney to his Lennon, a Miles to his Coltrane, but I suppose a better literal example is that of Truffaut and Godard. Collins shares Truffaut’s enjoyment of love-seeking people and the sensual pleasures of the imagination. Gunn’s cinematic (i.e. “dramatic” in the mise-en-scene sense) cinematographic recalcitrance or political edge could have exceeded Cassavetes or Godard had he lived but this is not to reduce Gunn and Collins to a comparative game but simply to celebrate what I feel each did better than the other. Collins’ developed singular style was a bit ahead of Gunn’s (not that singularity was what he was going for, mind you) and this may be partly due to her extraordinary collaborations with cinematographer AND editor Ronald K. Gray.
Gunn and Collins were just opposite sides of the same coin and that’s why it is almost compulsory for me to mention him when I mention her. (An ambitious film curator will one day do nothing but play their films in one program and then excerpt scenes side-by-side. It would be a fascinating feat to see and explore.)
Pearl Bowser, Bill Gunn, and Kathleen Collins – circa 1979 after a screening of Losing Ground (photo uncredited)
What Kathleen Collins’ The Cruz Brothers and Miss Malloy also gives us is an urge to be free, to literally want to run and “find ourselves.” People who scoff at this do so perhaps because they’ve never been lost. For many years I was never lost. But when you do find yourself lost or at a crossroads and hampered in between two worlds that suffocate all you want to do is escape. Collins’ desire to show this is obvious in both her features, but in Cruz Brothers it is through literal mad-cap rollicking sequences – the boys playing, running, declaring their love for the field that they roll down, tramping along a bridge, etc. One wonders what she might have done with the Beatles in A Hard Day’s Night. Her energy, not unlike Richard Lester’s, is one of seeking freedom at any cost and based in surrealism (her masters’ thesis was on Andre Breton). And sometimes the best way is to just drop everything, walk out the door, and have some fun. What also occurred to me in this “7 Degrees of Beatlemania” - is that Collins was also a playwright. And in the mid sixties she was in Europe, possibly around the same time as the avant-garde Adrienne Kennedy (“Funnyhouse of a Negro,” etc) who was being commissioned to adapt John Lennon’s two absurdist books In His Own Write & A Spaniard In the Works for the British stage. A Black American female playwright doing this in 1965-1966? That was huge. People think we have not come far. And we haven’t. We have taken 39 steps back. Nowadays, instead of lauding Kennedy or Collins we have charlatans like Lynn Nottage or Paula Vogel pimping the plight of the working class and women’s rights and getting upset when the establishment says “You’re not getting a Tony. Next!”
Collins could have bought entrée into this warped Theatrical Bourgeoisie that Franklin Frazier warns us about had she not had foresight and consciousness and been self possessed and courageous enough to have taken on the $60/week job as an editor. This is a woman who had a master’s and a PhD, folks – all in pursuit of teaching and language and academia. She had a lot of good job offers in the late 1960’s. And she simply made a choice (much to her family’s bewilderment) to follow her instinct for film and grasp the zedekoah that would be her raison d’être: Making films and teaching. Combining them, doing both – having a passion AND a job. One that she cared deeply about, for she was not a hack teacher. In fact she was one of the earliest film teachers in NYC. In the early seventies there were no film programs yet, they were all being developed around the time the Vietnam War ended and Collins taught at City University of New York for many years.
*
Collin’s magical realism exhibited in Cruz Brothers for some reason led me back to my love for Ermanno Olmi’s Legend of a Holy Drinker (surely able to convert all non-believers and down-and-outters to something or trust someone). The introduction of Malloy approaching the brothers reminded me of Olmi’s presentation of Joseph Roth’s hobo (magnificently played by Rutger Hauer)being approached by a man who changes his entire life, a literal patron saint.
“I saw your act,” Malloy states to the Brothers referring to their game of crossing a bridge in the woods. “Each time you cross that bridge you tempt fate. You’re tempted to jump. But you’re survivors. I have been one for many years but now I’m going to die.” And with that the film takes on a whole other plane, the hovering spirit of the dead father collides with the trajectory of Miss Malloy, her plans, and her eventual demise.
“Beautifully understated, subtly macabre, Collins directs humor which reveals pathos through behavior and dialogue.”
And all throughout the boys grow up, learn a bit about life, and even more importantly: develop their imagination. Perhaps that’s why the film tugs at my heart. If we can’t imagine, how can we ever achieve or strive or even learn how to wish?
Of course Miss Malloy reveals she was an actress or rather she wanted to be a stage actress and yet we never really know if her dream transpired or not. Most likely it didn’t and Collins makes this clear with a ballroom sequence not included in the novel to drive home the point that the Cruz Brothers decide to enable Miss Malloy’s fantasies, not simply cause they’re getting well paid to restore her mansion but because they’ve developed serious empathy and she is quite smitten with Jose, in particular, who reveals a secret: he wants to be an actor too.
Lies, acting and memories – true or false – begin to fill up the rest of the movie as we are slowly woven into Miss Malloy’s web. In one sense this is a love story and you could tangentially connect it to Fassbinder’s Ali: Fear Eats Soul. Not so much because of the obvious interracial or age issue but in the sense that all the participants in this ‘affair’ are self-made and are outsiders.
Collins’ dialectical forays into human actions and emotions bang up and debate with how we live and how we choose to remember. “I’m looking for my life. Have you seen my life,” she asks Victor at one point. Later she says, “Death is terrible when you cannot remember having lived.” It’s certainly a line and moment that gives you a lump in the throat especially as one begins to take stock of his or her own life. Collins’ sensitivity towards this is remarkable, it’s never corny or patronizing.
Kathleen Collins was also one of the most intelligent humorists of the cinema and if she had lived she’d have given both Mike Nichols and the far better Elaine May a run for their money. In fact, she did! Her first feature nearly beats out May’s debut (A New Leaf) and they both found equal footing by the late 1970’s with May’s own masterpiece Mikey & Nicky and Collins’ swan song Losing Ground (by then Nichols, never as great as he’d hoodwinked everyone into thinking he was, had lost his bite or willingly sold it out).
It would have been fascinating if May had written something for Collins to direct. There is a nearly Chekhovian moment in the film that could have been a May gag. Malloy sits the Brothers down after having done all the housework and she dumps a bunch of invitations on the table and informs them that invitations for the ball have to be mailed. She then dumps out a telephone book. The boys are incredulous. She tells them, “Invite everyone in the phone book cause everyone I know is dead.” Beautifully understated, subtly macabre, Collins directs humor which reveals pathos through behavior and dialogue. In concert with Gray’s creamy photography and gently non-linear editing, it makes for a fascinating and unique movie and sets a tone and style that became Kathleen Collins’ signature.
Lionel Pena as Jose in The Cruz Brothers and Miss Malloy
Watching The Cruz Brothers and Miss Malloy you can’t help but think about gently, gently moving towards one’s own past. And if a film doesn’t make you reflect on your own life then it’s worthless.
Liberty and imagination are key elements of any life. Not happiness. But the freedom to roam in, through, and around one’s life. Can a life be reclaimed? I think Malcolm X would say certainly. Tolstoy too. One can find one’s lost life as one can find one’s virginity. They are never truly lost or taken or given. They are possessed and they can be taken back the minute you decide, “No I am not going to do that again!” Now, we can’t all choose unfortunately but those of us who are haunted by regret or mistakes understand that unless one’s faults have dire consequences on another’s humanity the person you must learn to cherish is yourself. And your tribe. And often those of your tribe may actually not look like you but they may empathize with you and lead you both to look off in the same direction.