Sofia Coppola's Priscilla, Marie Antoinette, and the Act of Spinning Art from Autobiography

PRISCILLA 

(Sofia Coppola, 2023, USA, 113 minutes) 

Sofia Coppola’s best films tend to have some degree of autobiography to them. This is as true of the overtly autobiographical films–Somewhere, an account of a preteen girl (Elle Fanning) and her famously prickly father (Stephen Dorff), and the Oscar-winning Lost in Translation, an account of an unhappily married woman (Scarlett Johansson) marooned in Tokyo–as the literary adaptations. 

Priscilla, a remarkably faithful adaptation of Priscilla Presley's 1985 memoir (with Sandra Harmon), Elvis and Me, marks Coppola's fourth adapted screenplay to date after big-screen versions of Jeffrey Eugenides's 1993 novel The Virgin Suicides, Antonia Fraser's 2002 biography Marie Antoinette, and Thomas Cullinan's 1966 novel The Beguiled, which previously inspired the superior 1971 Don Siegel film with Clint Eastwood. Priscilla is also one of Coppola's more covertly, but distinctly autobiographical films. 

How does that work when Sofia was never married to an icon like Elvis? Well, the parallels are there, even if the exact circumstances differ, since she's married to a musician, Thomas Mars (née Croquet) of the French band Phoenix, who has composed the score for four of her feature films. 

Mars is also a native of Versailles where Coppola filmed Marie Antoinette with Kirsten Dunst from The Virgin Suicides as The Queen and her cousin, Jason Schwartzman, as the King. This isn't to suggest that Mars has much in common with Elvis in terms of fame, personality, or image, but the life of a full-time musician is a uniquely challenging one–sometimes marked by glitter, sometimes drudgery, and sometimes by long periods of soul-crushing inactivity–a life that both Sofia and Priscilla have more intimate knowledge of than most other women. Than most other people. 

As with Marie Antoinette, Priscilla explores the tension between the public and the private. Priscilla Beaulieu found fame as a 14-year-old when she started dating Elvis while he was stationed in Bremerhaven, West Germany for 17 months–more so when they married seven years later in Las Vegas–while Marie Antoinette found fame as a 14-year-old when she married Louis XVI, and Sofia was, essentially, born to it when she played Michael Corleone's infant nephew in 1972 best picture winner The Godfather. 

If anything, Sofia inherited a tendency towards autobiography from her formidable father, Francis Ford Coppola, who co-produced Priscilla. Her brother, Roman, also served as second unit director, and another cousin, Nicolas Cage, was once married to Priscilla's daughter, Lisa Marie.

Sofia continued to act throughout the 1980s, but it wasn't until 1990 that her modest fame as Francis's actress daughter turned to infamy when he cast the 18-year-old in The Godfather III, saddling her with a sizeable role--Michael Corleone's daughter--she was ill-equipped to play (as a last-minute replacement for Winona Ryder, who would reconvene with the elder Coppola in 1992 for Bram Stoker's Dracula). As Kyle Buchanan put it in a recent New York Times interview with Sofia, "Priscilla's feeling of being scrutinized by an entire country at such a formative age was all too relatable." 

If Sofia, as an actress, was seen as a dilettante, she was learning how to navigate Hollywood, sometimes by way of her father's projects, but more frequently through the films and music videos of friends and acquaintances; it's just that writing and directing would turn out to be her true métier. 

Priscilla, on the other hand, segued from girlfriend to wife to mother once she met Elvis in 1959. 

If she had any ambitions, they went out the window, because that's what he wanted, and initially, it's what she wanted, too, because she loved him--in the obsessive, single-minded way of the teenager that she was--and that's what women did in the 1960s, especially Southern women from good Christian homes. But also because she was a naïve young woman dazzled by his fame, his riches, and his larger-than-life personality. 

As in the candy-colored Marie Antoniette, Coppola luxuriates in the gilded, pseudo-gothic world to which Elvis (played by a very good Jacob Elordi) introduces his teenaged sweetheart (a spectacular Cailee Spaeny). 

Granted, Priscilla wasn't exactly poor, but solidly middle class. After Elvis returns to the States in 1960, he starts acting and recording again, but he was essentially footloose and fancy free. He and Priscilla stay in touch by mail and by phone, but he continues to see other women, just as he did in Germany, when he dated TV performer Anita Wood from 1957 to 1962. 

Coppola depicts all of this from Priscilla's point of view, just as she did in Marie Antoinette (Anita's presence is felt exclusively through the letters Elvis carelessly leaves where Priscilla can find them). The young woman appreciates the attention, which makes her feel special, but she doesn't yet realize the value Elvis places on her malleability, the all-important quality that sets her apart from the more sophisticated co-stars, like Ann-Margret and Nancy Sinatra, with whom he is linked during their courtship. 

Elvis denies one fling, but confirms the other. More significantly, he informs Priscilla that he would never commit to a woman who didn't put his needs first. As she wrote in her book, "I wasn't interested in a career, in Hollywood, or in anything else that would draw my attention away from him."

By Priscilla's 16th birthday, they still haven’t consummated their relationship–despite her protestations–but she receives her first invitation to Graceland, where she reconnects with Elvis's father, Vernon (Tim Post), his financial advisor, and the rest of his retinue; the family, friends, staffers, and hangers-on, many with whom he was already entwined while he was stationed in Germany. French cinematographer Philippe Le Sourd, who shot Coppola's last two films, makes the Memphis mansion seem impossibly luxurious, right down to the shag carpeting in which Priscilla kneads her freshly-manicured toes as if she were one especially self-satisfied cat. 

If she enjoys living in the lap of luxury with all the fancy gowns and jewels she desires (all beautifully designed by Stacey Battat), she worries they'll never really be alone, and for the most part, her fears will be realized. Elvis also gives her schoolgirl look an overhaul by insisting that she load up on the eyeliner and that she have her newly-bouffant hair dyed black like his. 

Considering that Coppola comes from a close-knit Italian-American clan, she has always excelled at depicting loneliness and isolation. 

This is particularly true of 2011's Somewhere, in which 11-year-old Cleo spends more time in LA and Milan hotel rooms than with her father when she accompanies him on a promotional tour. It's also true of 1999's The Virgin Suicides, in which the sheltered Lisbon sisters are like aliens at their suburban high school, admired for their untouchable blonde beauty, but never completely accepted or understood. 

A relationship with a superstar necessitates protracted periods during which Elvis, who aspired to become a serious actor like his hero, Marlon Brando, expects Priscilla to "keep the home fires burning" while he’s working on lucrative movies he finds increasingly humiliating, but if he has a hold on Priscilla, Colonel Tom Parker, who doesn't appear in the film, has a hold on him. In the book, it's more clear that Elvis's beloved, if troubled mother, who had passed before Priscilla came along, had the biggest hold on her son. He would do anything for Gladys Presley, his first, and possibly greatest, love. 

For all the glamor and excitement, though, Priscilla is still a teenager. As their romance becomes more serious, Elvis arranges for Vernon and his second wife, Dee (Stephanie Moore), to serve as her guardians while she attends a private Catholic school in Memphis. As in the book, Coppola makes it clear that Priscilla, who was spending most nights with Elvis and his friends, wouldn't have graduated if she hadn't cheated on her final algebra exam–and she even uses her proximity to Elvis to make it happen, proving that she isn't quite as sweet and innocent as he would like to believe. 

For the most part, though, she's everything he wants her to be. After all, he molded her to his specifications. The script never mentions grooming, but Priscilla presents what it feels like to a minor completely under the sway of an older, considerably more powerful person. 

Seattle music writer (and friend) Gillian Gaar, who has written five books about Elvis, told me before the press screening that message boards have been lighting up with fury over a film that almost none of these devoted fans are likely to have seen, and if they think they won't be pleased with Coppola's portrayal of Elvis, they're probably right, except she has the facts on her side. Jacob Elordi aptly captures Elvis's charm, his humor, and his seductiveness, but also his childishness, his sarcasm, his duplicity, and his anger, which results in a couple of minor, if disturbing physical altercations. 

Gillian, who wasn't as enthusiastic about the film, also directed me to a festival review that dismissed it as conventional--while praising the actors–but I beg to differ. And I'm not alone. As Paul Schrader posted to Facebook, "Priscilla could also have been called Beguiled. Its pleasures are insidious. It sneaks up inside you, finds a warm place and hovers there." It's ironic, because Schrader is a master when it comes to words, whereas Coppola is a sly filmmaker who speaks more through images–though there's nothing wrong with the dialogue in the film–but she makes well-trod material feel fresh, largely by ceding the spotlight to a vibrant Priscilla (to Spaeny's credit, I never doubted why Elvis found this young woman so irresistible). 

The film could have felt redundant after over a dozen Elvis biopics, and possibly even cheap, after Baz Luhrmann's razzle-dazzle Elvis, made on a budget over four times its size, but I didn't think about it once while watching Priscilla, which has its own uniquely feminine–and ultimately feminist–appeal. 

Granted, Coppola eschews any Elvis music–a fate that befell some versions of her father's 1983 S.E. Hinton adaptation, The Outsiders–but it never comes across as a liability, because her film concerns the private Elvis more than the public one, and so she fills the soundtrack with the kinds of singles he and Priscilla might have spun on the hi-fi. She also throws in a few anachronistic selections, much as she did in Marie Antoinette, like Spectrum's "How You Satisfy Me." Purists may balk, but it worked for me (according to this Billboard piece, Authentic Brands Group withheld the rights to Elvis's catalog). Naturally, Phoenix provided the sympathetic score. 

Eventually, as the situation becomes untenable, Priscilla extricates herself from Elvis's increasingly toxic world. When they met, he was already using pills to sleep and pills to wake up, encouraging her to use them to stay alert during class and to get shut-eye after all-night gallivanting, but she got out while the getting was good, whereas his addictions became unstoppable. 

Sofia tracks the trajectory from neat shirts and slacks to black leather to Evel Knievel-type jumpsuits, but avoids showing the bloated, sweaty mess Elvis had become at the end of Luhrmann’s film–and in real life–but she's more interested in Priscilla, who stopped teasing her hair, applying false eyelashes and heavy makeup, and wearing the outfits he chose from her. 

All of this is over in a matter of minutes. Though Coppola's budget was slashed, and she had to cut 10 pages from her script, the film might not be much different otherwise, since Elvis and Me also speeds through this stuff quickly, with no indication as to what Priscilla's life was like from 1973, when she and Elvis divorced, and 1985, when the book was published. 

Coppola uses ellipses as she moves from one chapter to the next. For instance, she shows Priscilla training with karate instructor Mike Stone, a hobby Elvis encouraged her to pursue, but she doesn't make it clear that Priscilla had an affair with him. In the book, Priscilla admits to two affairs (the other man was a dance instructor). I'm not sure Coppola needed to be explicit, but anyone who hasn't read the book, or doesn't arrive with some knowledge of Priscilla's personal life, might think she remained faithful from start to finish, though she swears she did during their extended courtship.

The film ends with a song that will strike some viewers as perfect and others as obvious--possibly even lazy--except Elvis literally sang it to Priscilla after their divorce. For a filmmaker known for her subtlety, it spells things out emphatically, but I found it moving. After all, a film that involves Elvis can't be too restrained the whole way through; that isn't who he was and it wasn't who Priscilla was--while she was with him--even if Coppola defines the concept.

Then again, for all the autobiographical elements in the film–the fame and/or infamy, the unwanted attention, the judgment, the criticism–Priscilla isn't her story, or even a version of her story, but Priscilla Presley's, the sometimes maligned, misunderstood, and long suffering ex-wife who helped to write the book and to produce the motion picture. 

But it's still a Sofia Coppola film, and I believe it's one of her best.

Priscilla opens in Seattle on Thurs, Nov 2, at the Meridian, Thornton Place, Majestic Bay, and other area theaters. Images: Cailee Spaeny as Priscilla (Sabrina Lantos / Vanity Fair), Kirsten Dunst as Marie Antoinette wearing Fred Leighton jewels (The Adventurine), Spaeney and Jacob Elordi as Priscilla and Elvis (A24/Deadline), Elvis and Ann-Margret in Viva Las Vegas (MGM / Far Out Magazine), the real-life Priscilla (Elvis and Me), The Virgin Suicides (Ronald Grant / The Guardian), and Priscilla (YouTube / Looper).  

Under Blue Moon, I Saw You: Deconstructing Martin Scorsese's Killers of the Flower Moon

KILLERS OF THE FLOWER MOON 

(Martin Scorsese, 2023, USA, 206 minutes) 

The term auteur often, but not exclusively, refers to directors who write or co-write their own screenplays. Martin Scorsese is an auteur. He has created a distinctive body of work defined by certain themes, visual tropes, and other characteristics. But he doesn't always write or co-write his own screenplays. Of his 26 feature films to date, only his 1967 debut, Who's That Knocking at My Door, bears a solo screenwriting credit. 

This isn't to suggest that he doesn't know how to write, but rather that he would prefer to co-write--which he has done at least six times--and to concentrate on directing. And he is definitely a reader. Altogether, 17 of his feature films have been adapted from novels or non-fiction books, most recently David Grann's 2017 Killers of the Flower Moon, a deeply-researched account of the murders of Osage Nation people in 1920s Oklahoma. 

It's a fool's game to expect a movie to reproduce a book, and that isn't what I wanted or expected from Scorsese's film, which he cowrote with Eric Roth, an Oscar-winning writer who has been involved with some terrific pictures, like Michael Mann's The Insider (faithfully adapted from Marie Brenner's Vanity Fair article), and some not-so-terrific ones, like Robert Zemeckis's Forrest Gump (a de-fanged version of Winston Groom's 1986 novel).   

As Grann told Mark Yarm of Depth Perception regarding books and movies, "They really are different mediums." It's a lesson I learned the hard way as a teenager when I expected Stanley Kubrick's 1980 adaptation of The Shining to recreate the chillingly realistic scenario Stephen King had conjured up in his 1977 novel, but that isn't what he did, and it took me years to appreciate his over-the-top, hallucinogenic take on King's more traditional haunted house material.

In Scorsese's take on Killers of the Flower Moon, he concentrates on three primary players: full-blooded Osage native Mollie Kyle (Montana-born, Seattle-raised Lily Gladstone, who is of Blackfeet and Nez Perce descent), her Texas-born husband Ernest Burkhart (Leonardo DiCaprio in his sixth film with the director), and Ernest's uncle, cattleman and civic leader William "Bill" Hale (Robert De Niro in his 10th), the self-proclaimed King of the Osage Hills, whereas David Grann concentrated on those three, in addition to Tom White (Jesse Plemons), the Texas Ranger-turned-FBI agent tasked by J. Edgar Hoover to investigate the murders. 

Though White's biography, both before and after the investigation, takes up a substantial portion of Grann's book, it makes dramatic sense to minimize it in the film, and it's to Plemons' credit that his decent, no-nonsense inspector makes a significant impact with relatively minimal screen time. 

By contrast, Mollie becomes even more of a presence, since Scorsese depicts both her courtship and marriage to Ernest--events absent from the book--but it's a mixed blessing. Gladstone is perfectly cast, and she ably captures the forthrightness that appears to have defined the real Mollie, but it's never completely clear what this perceptive, coolheaded woman sees in Ernest, who doesn't have much to offer. She knows he's after her money, and he doesn't completely deny it, so she isn't a total mark, but she surely could have found a more worthy partner. I can only assume some combination of loneliness and lust allowed her to overlook some pretty obvious flaws.   

Still, life is pleasant enough for a time, but when Mollie's three sisters start to drop dead, along with several other townspeople, it becomes clear that something is very, very wrong--and that Ernest is involved in some way. In the book, his duplicity doesn't become apparent as quickly. In fact, Grann structures the entire narrative like a murder mystery, though there's nothing tawdry or sensationalist about his approach. Scorsese and Roth give the game away too soon, and it deprives this lengthy film of much of the tension that drives the taut book. To be clear, Ernest is only one henchman among many--all white--that targeted Osage citizens for their oil headrights. 

Scorsese instead builds the suspense around Mollie's health, which rapidly declines once she starts taking the newly-discovered insulin for her diabetes--the town doctors, who are as hinky as they come, instruct Ernest to add a little something "extra" to each dose--and the efforts of White and his G-men to gather enough evidence to start making some arrests. 

If Mollie seems a little enigmatic, despite Gladstone's best efforts, the same can't be said of Ernest or Hale. As written and performed, it's always clear what these money-hungry guys are about. A deglamorized DiCaprio and an older-than-ever-looking De Niro are so good, in fact, that it's easy to forget that this pairing in a Scorsese picture has been a long time coming. 

The director began his feature-film career with Harvey Keitel, with whom he would continue to collaborate--as recently as 2019's The Irishman--before shifting to De Niro as his primary leading man and then to DiCaprio. The actors in tandem unite the two ends of Scorsese's career, while also representing a 30-year reunion between De Niro and DiCaprio, who first teamed up in the 1993 adaptation of Tobias Wolff's memoir, This Boy's Life, as a Northwest teenager and his abusive stepfather, Dwight, in the 1950s. If Hale is considerably kinder to his nephew, Ernest, he's ultimately a criminal mastermind, while Dwight was more of a petty tyrant. 

It must have been satisfying for Scorsese to finally work with these two in the same film, since De Niro wasn't available to play mob boss Frank Costello in 2006's The Departed, and so he went with his second choice: Jack Nicholson. It would be Nicholson's last great role before retiring. 

If the three leads acquit themselves nicely in Killers of the Flower Moon, there are plenty of strong supporting performances from, among others, Pat Healy as a G-man, Larry Fessenden as a radio actor, and Americana musician and social media star Jason Isbell as Mollie's brother-in-law, who nicely holds his own against DiCaprio in a tense drawing room sequence. 

Production designer Jack Fisk and costume designer Jacqueline West, who have often worked with director Terence Malick, and the late musician and composer Robbie Robertson, who was of Cayuga and Mohawk descent, also do stellar work. In his 12th collaboration with Scorsese, dating back to the landmark 1979 Band concert film The Last Waltz, Robertson provides a reverb-drenched, bass guitar-based score that neatly splits the difference between elegiac and understated. The film is dedicated to his memory.

Brendan Fraser, on the other hand, makes a bizarre appearance as Hale's attorney. Granted, cinematographer Rodrigo Prieto, who last worked with Scorsese on The Irishman, shoots him from a low angle, making Fraser look larger than life in an Orson Welles-in-the-1950s kind of way. When his W.S. Hamilton shouts "You dumb boy!" at Ernest, who is indeed a dumb boy, the audience at the press screening laughed. I'm not sure Fraser's outburst--which is as unexpected as Philip Seymour Hoffman's "Pigfuck!" in P.T. Anderson's The Master--was intended to be funny, but I certainly enjoyed it. 

If the film's structure blunts its impact, the story is still undeniably powerful, and Scorsese's sympathy and respect for the Osage always shines through, not least because he doesn't depict them as perfect, but as real, flawed, inherently decent human beings who didn't deserve the fate that befell them. This is particularly true of two of the earliest victims: Mollie's hard-partying sister, Anna (Cara Jade Myers, who is of Wichita descent), and her "melancholic" brother-in-law, Henry Roan (William Belleau, Esk’etemc First Nation), with whom she and Hale share a complicated history. 

As for Mollie herself, Scorsese gives her the relatively happy ending she fully earns, except Mollie's guardianship would actually continue until she was 44, at which point she was finally judged "competent" (I find this as enervating as the fact that Michael Oher, the football player Michael Lewis depicted in The Blind Side, wasn't judged competent until he was 37--and only after he sued to terminate Sean and Leigh Anne Tuohy's control over his finances). By all accounts, Mollie was always competent, except Osage with headrights were required to report their every expense to a white guardian, the exact sort of dynamic that made it easier than ever for these seemingly respectable businesspeople to take advantage of their Native American wards. 

As Grann writes in his book, the Reign of Terror, as the murders of the Osage became known, made the national news in the 1920s. It wasn't just some obscure, regional story, but an all-American scandal that everyone knew about until, over the years, they didn't any longer. It had faded from view. The book helped to bring it back, and the movie is likely to reach an even wider audience, though anyone who hasn't read it should know that the situation Scorsese depicts, tragic as it is, was actually a lot worse. 

As Grann found through his research, particularly his interviews with the descendants of the victims, the murders appear to have begun as early as 1918 and continued as late as 1931, even though several perpetrators--many of whom Scorsese includes in the film--had been caught, tried, and convicted for the murders that took place between 1921 and 1926. 

Once Tom White's investigation was over, he and his men scattered to the four winds (White would end up leaving the bureau altogether). Their job was over, but the story--the killings--continued. By then Hoover and the FBI had moved on to other cases. Though the Osage get some justice in the film, just as they did in real life, there were dozens of other suspicious deaths that weren't deemed sufficiently important or timely enough to merit investigation. And we'll never know how many.

But because of the book and now the movie, the world knows about Mollie Burkhart, who lost most everything she held dear, except for her two oldest children, during the Reign of Terror. Those children had children, and Mollie's granddaughter, Margie Burkhart, served as one of David Grann's primary sources for Killers of the Flower Moon. In a way, it's the best revenge: Mollie's story, and the story of the grave injustice suffered by her people, may have faded for a time, but now it's more alive than ever.

Killers of the Flower Moon opens on Fri, Oct 20, at the Meridian, Pacific Place, and several other area theaters. Erica Tremblay's Fancy Dance, starring Lily Gladstone, screens at Northwest Film Forum on Sun, Oct 22, as part of Seattle Queer Film Festival. Chase Hutchinson will be interviewing cowriter Miciana Alise after the screening. Click here for more information. 

Images: The Telegraph (Gladstone), Amazon (book), Vulture (DiCaprio and Gladstone), Cowboys and Indians (Robert De Niro), Apple Original Films (Jason Isbell and Cara Jade Myers), and Discussing Film (Jesse Plemons). 

A Look Back at Ari Folman's 2008 Israeli Anti-War Documentary Waltz with Bashir

WALTZ WITH BASHIR

(Ari Folman, 2008, Germany/France/Israel, 90 minutes) 

This is an expanded version of a review originally written for Amazon that moved around over the years.

Oscar nominee and César Award winner for Best Foreign Film, Ari Folman's Waltz with Bashir presents an intriguing riddle: is a documentary still a documentary if it's animated? Taking over where fact-based animations like Richard Linklater's Waking Life or Brett Morgen's Chicago 10 left off, Israel's Folman uses animation to wrap his head around 1982's Lebanon War (and takes his title from Lebanese leader Bashir Gemayel).

Why, Folman wonders at the outset, do disturbing dreams plague his former army colleagues, while he remembers nothing? He meets with nine of them to find out. As they speak, animated sequences bring their recollections to life, but instead of rotoscope or video-capture, Folman first shot his film on video and then assembled an animated version from the storyboards. 

This graphic-novel approach suits their strange, surrealistic stories, and parallels the work of Black Hole mastermind Charles Burns, who tends to walk on the shadowy side, unlike Iran-born Marjane Satrapi's more fanciful graphic novel and documentary Persepolis (co-directed with Vincent Paronnaud), which depicts political turmoil from a young person's POV. 

 

And it's hard to imagine Jonas Poher Rasmussen's 2021 documentary, Flee, the first-person account of an Afghan refugee in Denmark, without Folman's example--animation also suits Rasmussen's film perfectly. 

War may be hell for people of all ages, but Folman ensures that moments of grace and beauty shine through, best exemplified by Roni Dayag’s recollection of a late-night swim away from the scene of a beachfront battle. Decades later, he still remembers the soothing peacefulness of the water. 

These reminiscences nudge Folman's repressed memories back to the surface, culminating in a horrific massacre to which he bore witness. Arguably, he didn't need to include actual footage of the Palestinian casualties when stylized graphic images get the point across just fine. 

If Waltz with Bashir isn't a documentary in the conventional sense--some sources classify it as a docudrama--it doesn't resemble most animated efforts either. What matters more is the harrowing narrative Folman constructs from out of the minds of these haunted men. Himself included.

Images from the IMDb. Waltz with Bashir is available to stream for free on Tubi. It's also available on DVD and through a number of digital pay operators, including Apple TV, Google Play, Prime Video, Vudu, and YouTube.

The Sequel We Didn't Need: Robert Taylor's 1974 The Nine Lives of Fritz the Cat

THE NINE LIVES OF FRITZ THE CAT 

(Robert Taylor, USA, 1974, 76 minutes)

Director Ralph Bakshi (Heavy Traffic) and producer Steve Krantz (Spider-Man) originally brought R. Crumb's sex-obsessed comic book character Fritz the Cat to life in a 1972 animated picture that became a hit on the grindhouse circuit. Though populated entirely by cute talking animals, the material was aimed strictly at adults. 

While Bakshi set his film in the 1960s, his longtime collaborator, Robert "Bob" Taylor, has set his sequel in the 1970s. Notably, neither Crumb nor Bakshi were involved with the 1974 film, and it shows. Fritz (voiced again by The Electric Company's Skip Hinnant) remains a blue-hued tabby in a red sweater, but he's added a military-style jacket to his pants-free ensemble. 

In his younger days, Fritz was a naïve stoner trying to make it with co-eds and mucking about in leftist causes; now he's an unemployed stoner with a loudly nagging (and visibly braless) old lady and their onanistic toddler. Fritz once fancied himself a writer and a poet, but those dreams died after he dropped out of college. Worse yet, he's become an adulterer and a homophobe. 

In both films, the city features several species, mostly cats and dogs, while Black characters are represented exclusively by crows, a trope Crumb appears to have swiped from Disney's Dumbo, but if Fritz the Cat offered a satire of race relations, Taylor's attempt feels more off-putting than not. 

In one of his nine lives, Fritz travels to New Jersey, now known as New Africa, an all-Black state that has seceded from the union and installed their own Idi Amin-like president. About the state's young ladies, Fritz salaciously observes, "These chicks know where it's at by the time they're 11." 

Though he has arrived to deliver a letter on behalf of President Henry Kissinger, he ends up facing execution for the assassination of the Black president (in the first film, Fritz started a race riot). He escapes by hiding in the sewer, a callback to the time he hid in a toilet from porcine police in the first film. 

In other lives, he's a doomed womanizer, a randy astronaut, and an aid to Adolf Hitler--played as a genitally-impaired, homosexual buffoon who would have preferred to become a ballerina. None of this is especially clever or funny, not least the incessant sexism. If objectification was always part of Fritz the Cat's world, it's simply more pernicious this time around. 

The animation, a combination of two-dimensional figures and watercolor-like backdrops, however, isn't bad and the score from Tom Scott and the L.A. Express, with uncredited vocals from the great soul singer Merry Clayton, adds welcome funk flavor, but Fritz's naïve charm got lost along the way. 

Nonetheless, R. Crumb has always distanced himself from Ralph Bakshi's original film, with which he expressed extreme displeasure (his first wife, Dana Morgan, with whom he shared power of attorney, sold the rights without his express permission). Crumb got his revenge by killing off the character.

According to Michael Barrier in Funnyworld, "In a fifteen-page story, 'Fritz the Cat, Superstar,' Fritz is pictured as a degenerate movie star who meets his end when a spurned female ostrich pierces his skull with an icepick. Before that, though, Fritz interrupts his wenching and boozing long enough for a script conference with some Hollywood hotshots, including two named 'Ralphy' and 'Stevie.' Crumb thus not only gigs Bakshi and Krantz, but lays to rest a character he feels he has outgrown." Considering that the sequel retains even less of his distinctive style and humor, it's unlikely he's a fan. 

As for cowriter Eric Monte, he would go on to bigger and better things when he wrote the semi-autobiographical script for Michael Schultz's Krantz-produced Black comedy Cooley High, the big-screen inspiration behind the ABC sitcom What’s Happening!!, which would appear the following year.

The Nine Lives of Fritz the Cat is available on Blu-ray from Kino Lorber. Images: The Movie Database (Fritz), Retro Junk (his wife and cat), the IMDb (Hitler), and Rotten Tomatoes, where Fritz has a "rotten" score of 33%.