A mirthful tone creeps into Stuart Klawans’s voice at the mere mention of Elaine May’s widely panned 1987 movie, Ishtar. “Yes, that qualifies as a ‘folly,’” he says, “probably the last from the U.S. for some time.” Klawans, film critic for the Nation, has just written a history of this peculiar genre, Film Follies: The Cinema Out of Order.
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Klawans’s notion of “film follies” originated four years ago as he was writing a proposal to the Museum of Modern Art for a series that he says would “parade those really big, big movies on MOMA’s big screen.” As he worked he developed a thesis “that not only sheds light on the common traits of all those oversize, grandly delirious movies but also connects them to the cultural milieu and economic order of their time.” The impetus for Fritz Lang’s costly extravaganza Metropolis, he notes, can be traced to the emergence of the “New Woman” in 1920s Germany. That country’s changing fortunes in World War II brought about Goebbels’s commission of Kolberg (1945). “The Nazis diverted military resources to complete this propaganda epic about a town whose citizens defied the forces of Napoleon,” he says. “Considering that they were perpetrating war and genocide at the same time, this was a grotesque folly.”
The most obvious trait of follies, Klawans says, is a “wasteful excess of money.” Cleopatra is a famous instance that almost sank a studio. But a bloated budget alone doesn’t elevate a movie into follydom. Otherwise, Klawans says, “Heaven’s Gate would be one. Or Waterworld. Their total lack of imagination stands in contrast with the overabundance of imagination showered on Cleopatra by Joseph Mankiewicz.”
