Unexpected catapult to stardom, Clive Owen’s rare journey with ‘Croupier’ in 25th anniversary screening

Film
edgy mien of clive own in croupier

Remember video rental stores? Just another blip in the fast-paced technological “advances” we have lived through. And yet, I used to enjoy walking to the video place on Hyperion Avenue, a second floor, full scale retail shop, with movies lovingly organized by genre, and staffed by human beings who were ready to recommend rentals to you. First, the place gave up half its square footage then one day it closed and not a single tear shed over its disappearance.

And yet, that is how and where I randomly discovered ‘Croupier.’ I just took a chance on it, brought home the disc and shoved it in the little slot on my DVD player. And I thought it was just tremendous. That’s why I’ll be in the house for a second viewing when Laemmle Theatres and the Anniversary Classics Series present a 25th anniversary screening of the sleeper directed by Mike Hodges, and starring Clive Owen.

Owen will be present for q/a after the film.

The film opened in England in 1999 but made few waves at the box office. When it came to America in 2000, veteran marketing executive Mike Kaplan (who had worked frequently with Stanley Kubrick, Lindsay Anderson, Robert Altman, Alan Rudolph, and Malcolm McDowell) devised a new marketing campaign that highlighted Owen’s resemblance to tough-guy Hollywood stars like Humphrey Bogart, Robert Mitchum, and Richard Widmark. The strategy worked, and the picture lit up art house screens for months, eventually reaching mainstream theaters as well. Mike Kaplan, you Friend of Arts Meme (F.O.A.M.), I’m thinking I picked up that DVD because I liked the cover image! Well done indeed!

owen, in scene with wonderful british actress gina mckee

In a script by Paul Mayersberg (author of Nicolas Roeg’s ‘The Man Who Fell to Earth’ and ‘Eureka,’ as well as Nagisa Oshima’s ‘Merry Christmas, Mr. Lawrence’), Owen plays an aspiring writer who takes a job at a casino where he juggles a few romantic relationships and also has to contend with a robbery threat.

The New York Times’ Stephen Holden called the film “a breezy meditation on life as a game of chance,” and he added, “Clive Owen conveys a sharp, cynical intelligence that rolls off the screen whenever he widens his glittering blue eyes.” Newsweek’s David Ansen declared, “Coolly hypnotic, the lean British sleeper ‘Croupier‘ is a reminder that movies don’t have to wave their arms and scream to hold our attention.” Roger Ebert wrote that Owen has “the same sort of physical reserve as Sean Connery in the Bond pictures.” Newsday’s Gene Seymour wrote, “Not since 1971 has British director Mike Hodges made a movie as deep, dark and compelling as this thriller.”

The movie’s success catapulted Owen to stardom. He earned an Oscar nomination when he costarred with Julia Roberts, Jude Law, and Natalie Portman in Mike Nichols’ ‘Closer.’ He costarred in Spike Lee’s ‘Inside Man’ with Denzel Washington and Jodie Foster.  Owen was part of the large ensemble cast in Robert Altman’s Oscar-winning ‘Gosford Park.’ He had the leading role in Alfonso Cuaron’s futuristic thriller ‘Children of Men.’ He played Sir Walter Raleigh to Cate Blanchett’s Queen Elizabeth in ‘Elizabeth: The Golden Age,’ then re-teamed with Roberts in ‘Duplicity.’ He also starred with Juliette Binoche in Fred Schepisi’s ‘Words and Pictures.’

In television as well, starring in Steven Soderbergh’s acclaimed medical series ‘The Knick.’ He earned an Emmy nomination playing Ernest Hemingway in Philip Kaufman’s ‘Hemingway and Gelhorn,’ co-starring with Nicole Kidman. In Ryan Murphy’s TV miniseries ‘American Crime Story,’ Owen played President Bill Clinton during the Monica Lewinsky affair. And he recently played a modern-day version of detective Sam Spade in ‘Monsieur Spade.’

Mike Kaplan will introduce the screening by reporting on its troubled but ultimately triumphant history. Owen will participate in a Q&A after the film. 

CROUPIER | Laemmle Anniversary Classics | Royal Theatre Santa Monica | Wednesday June 4

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‘The space between us all’: Mark Morris’s ‘PEPPERLAND’ in fetching revival 1

Dance · Music · Reviews

When this Fab Four configuration of Mark Morris dancers made a 90-degree turn to march directly toward the audience in the culminating moments of ‘Pepperland,’ the much-heralded choreographer Mark Morris’s brilliant dance-and-music homage to the Beatles’ culture-bending “Sgt Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band,” album of 1967, I laughed. It was so funny. But my heartstrings tugged at the perfection of Morris’s choice of step.

Everything about the march clicked. Its evocation of a military parade, only, not performed by grunts in drab fatigues but by dandies in superstar sunglasses and rainbow-hued, Carnaby Street-inspired suits. And the simplicity of the swinging arms, after Morris’s many cleverly decorative ones in the hour-long pageant that had preceded. From spanning arms that carve space to step into (Jack Cole liked that arm too); to Bharatanatyum’s twisty overhead scallops; to clenched fists pounding a side-to-side boogaloo; or, hands still fisted, tucked toward the waistline like teacup-handles as dancers whirr in chaine turns. But mostly, it was the march’s upbeat confidence that captured me. It’s a nostalgia item for Americans today, as we drag through a cultural cataclysm nearly the inverse of ‘Pepperland.’ No longer do John Paul George and Ringo rule the airwaves. Terrible, stupid people do. And it gave a slight boost to be reminded of a different, if seemingly bygone, era.

‘Pepperland’ doesn’t need a review. It has garnered many. Morris, clearly inspired (it’s his generation), created it in 2017 for the City of Liverpool’s Sgt. Pepper at 50 Festival, a delicious invitation, and it has been in circulation since. Southern Californians saw it in 2019 at Segerstrom Center for the Arts and now, again, this past weekend at the Wallis Annenberg Center, where it seems to have wound down a recent touring spiel. You may wish to check this page to see if ‘Pepperland’ will be popping its perky head elsewhere in the future.

It may not need a review, but it merits celebration. It’s more than an interpretation of the seminal album we baby boomers pored over (including a cover image subject to infinite scrutiny and interpretation, and Morris evokes that through dance so wittily), with songs evincing the lives, loves, dreams, traumas, fears and aspirations of young people. ‘Pepperland’ salutes an era.

Ethan Iverson‘s raucous score revamps six “Sgt Pepper” songs and adds original compositions for voice, theremin, soprano sax, trombone, piano, organ, harpsichord, percussion in a spectrum of sound delivered by a very busy pit band in in dirges, rock-and-roll, ragas and honky-tonk. Working beat-by-beat to this score, Morris’s foundational fascination with the patternings and repetitions of folk dance lend the work its underpinning. A majordomo of lines, formations, shapes, comings together and unravelings, Morris was in the zone working to Iverson’s kooky deconstructed “Sgt Pepper” favorites.

“With a Little Help From My Friends” which features the superlative dancer Dallas McMurray, in purple turtleneck and khaki trousers (the well-fitting costumes in popping primary colors by designer Elizabeth Kurtzman) to an arrangement syncopated by bongos with a choreographic fillip of a single big kick to one side and a slurry dance-drag in recovery. “Do you need anybody? I just need someone to love” gets the shoulder lean pictured above. I smiled at Morris’s abundant visual punnery; what’s not to love? A new tone takes hold as two same-sex couples slow-dance to a lush piano. As the couples break apart, one partner spins in rapid turns, while the other encircles him or her. Simple, real, and exquisite. “When I’m Sixty-Four” as English music hall oom-pah-pah starts with an all-hands-on-deck kick line that gradually reduces to a bare-boned few. A kick line that is all arms and legs and a mini-squiggle of the derriere unwinds to the point of raunchiness, with music gone carney, burly-Q. Next up (my favorite section for its introspective nature), the trill of a clarinet and a sprinkling of tabla: it’s The Quiet Beatle’s “Within You, Without You.”

We were talking about the space between us all
And the people who hide themselves behind a wall of illusion
Never glimpse the truth
Then it’s far too late
When they pass awa
y

With our love, we could save the world, if they only knew

Try to realise it’s all within yourself
No one else can make you change

It was marvelous to watch this while thinking of George Harrison, about whom we learned so much in Martin Scorsese’s excellent HBO documentary. I may have been projecting but I felt that Morris was interweaving sadness about Harrison’s too-young death into the dance. And it doesn’t matter if I was projecting. Art is meant to spur associations like that.

It’s all in ‘Pepperland’: the sexual revolution, gay liberation, the yearning and striving, the curiosity, the teamwork and the loneliness. Mind-bending hallucinogens, and pop figures blown up to mythic proportion. All of these strands first showed up in the ’60s and in one form or another; for better or worse, they are with us still.

He blew his mind out in a car
He didn’t notice that the lights had changed
A crowd of people stood and stared

But I just had to look.
Having read the book.

I’d love to turn you on.

Who writes song lyrics like that? And makes them quite so harrowing and unforgettable? Answering that question was Morris’s brief, a mission he fulfilled excellently. He is in such fine fettle in this work, operating with simple discipline. For me, it’s the top dance work of our still-young millennium, assuming, of course that we drag on for 75 more years, god willing not in the hands of the monsters currently locking down our political system .

Yes, the sixties do seem earnest in hindsight. Among its pleasures and impact, ‘Pepperland’ also spurs the question: How, given all the energy and innovation, have we sunk so low? It’s on you to evade or answer that for yourself.


Dance critic Debra Levine is founder/editor/publisher of arts●meme. Debra celebrated forty years of published dance criticism in 2024.

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Dance · Music
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Architecture & Design · Music
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