Review
Lenny Bruce Without Tears
Directed by Fred Baker
First Run Features, 1972
I went to the video store the other day and found a movie about a man who wandered the countryside speaking to people. He was considered a radical and an innovator, eventually hounded to death by the authorities for his beliefs. His life and story are recorded poorly, almost as much myth as reality. He spoke in stories and his words set people free. The movie was Lenny Bruce Without Tears.
If you haven’t heard of Lenny Bruce you are not alone. After an initial flurry of interest following his death in 1966, official entertainment records have seemingly erased his name from all but the margins and footnotes. A darling of the burgeoning counterculture scene, Bruce shattered too many taboos. Known nowadays as one of the first "dirty" comics, Bruce not only challenged language conventions by swearing onstage, but defied sexual, racial and religious conventions as well. However, the system that Bruce was attempting to undermine struck back through censorship and charges of obscenity that largely derailed his career.
Based largely on the interest generated by Ronald Collins and David Skover’s 2003 book, The Trials of Lenny Bruce, Fred Baker’s 1972 documentary Lenny Bruce Without Tears has been reissued on DVD. Baker provides an overview to Bruce’s life, starting with a brief biography and his earliest appearances on The Tonight Show. The few written accounts of Bruce, such as in Don Dellilo’s Underworld, highlight his unique Beat-style delivery, and to see him in the early performances is a treat – thin, sharp, manic and freeform, not yet speeding on drugs. The Beat references are strong, from the finger-snapping and daddy-o lingo, to the impromptu impersonations and free-form jazz-style ramblings. Bruce’s reluctance to stay still for a TV camera shows through, the glint in his eye unmistakably hinting at a wider world that can’t be shown on TV.
Baker makes the most of the material he has – a few live TV performances from the 1950s and several TV interviews from the 1960s. The best of Bruce’s material is from live stage recordings of which no video survives, and Baker opts to fill this void with montages of stock 1950s film images. Sometimes these images succeed in providing an ironic or surrealist counterpoint to Bruce’s commentary, but not often.
The later live footage of Bruce proves harder to watch. He often appears high, overweight and slow, talking to reporters about the obscenity trials that have broken him professionally, financially and emotionally. He often felt sympathetic to police officers who he said were pressured to arrest him. Once he was charged with obscenity in one jurisdiction, how could others not fail to act? His New York bust in 1964 was the one that did him in, dragging on for months. Baker interviews many of the attorneys involved, such as Vincent Ciucca, the assistant District Attorney, who agrees that the case was blown out of proportion. The final scenes cut from the trial to a naked Bruce, dead in his washroom from a morphine overdose a year and a half later.
As one of the first comedians to try and make a career by using shock and outrage to question social mores, it is hard to imagine where future comedians like George Carlin or Richard Pryor could have gone. Furthermore, his influence on the Berkeley free speech movement and through it the 1960s in general remains to be critically examined. Sadly, despite the passing of almost a half century, his campaign for more openness and tolerance is as incomplete now as it was then. |
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