Tales of Ordinary Madness is a snappier title than the book it’s based on. Charles Bukowski’s Erections, Ejaculations, Exhibitions, and General Tales of Ordinary Madness is the source of Marco Ferreri’s semi-doomed attempt to get the beat poet for guys (always guys) too young for Kerouac et al onto the screen.
It doesn’t work and it can’t work – Bukowski is all about the voice, the words – but Ferreri at least gives it the college try in his second American movie. Oddly, like the first, Bye Bye Monkey, it’s a bitty affair with not much in the way of plot to hang onto.
But that’s what you get when you adapt a book of short stories. They all, as anyone who has read any Bukowski will tell you, centre on Bukowski himself, the solipsistic “hero” of a series of encounters between himself, various bottles of booze and various women, all mad or hysterical, or sex-obsessed, or destructive, or all of the above.
These stories probably weren’t made up, if Bukowski’s pocked, ravaged face was any evidence, and they were all huge fun to read, vicarious kicks derived from bulletins from an edge most people would like to think they could handle, if only it wasn’t for having to get up for work in the morning.
If you’ve seen Barfly, Mickey Rourke and Barbet Schroeder’s attempt to get Bukowski onto the screen, you’ll find this film from six years earlier quite familiar. Some plot similarity, similar grunge aesthetic, same essential schematic – one woman after another – same indecisiveness about how much to glamourise a life of deadbeat bars and downbeat motel rooms which Bukowski himself could put a heroic gloss on because he used words like a charm.
It’s noir after noir, without a plot, and here Ben Gazzara – himself no stranger to the bottle – takes on the role of Charles Serking (the Bukowski figure), a randy middle-aged soak and urban knight (ab)errant who we first meet trying to pick up a 14-year-old girl at a reading he’s been invited to. After that Vera (Susan Tyrell, mouth all over her face), a woman he follows home because she’s “radiating heat”. The ex-wife, Vicky (Tanya Lopert), angry as hell but still carrying a torch. The spectacularly beautiful prostitute Cass (Ornella Muti), the woman he falls for and who is doomed as a consequence.
Gazzara never looks drunk, which was possibly also the case with Bukowski, and he never looks like a man seeking redemption, which is the thrust of all the encounters between the sabotaging Serking and the people who want to save him.
Ferreri was Italian, and though this movie is shot in America, there is Italian input, from DP Tonino Delli Conti, the brilliant cinematographer who worked with Pasolini and on Leone’s Once Upon a Time in the West. He is held back by Ferreri’s more grunge-attuned eye and only really let loose on the scenes featuring Cass (she gets the beauty treatment, significantly). The score is by Frenchman Philippe Sarde, who gives Ferreri Italian-inflected guitars and soft strings. Together Delli Conti and Sarde help put a kink in the familiar.
“The defeated, the demented and the damned – they’re the real people in this world and I was proud to be in their company,” Gazzara’s voiceover tells us as Charles is bedding down with the winos a one point. Ferreri’s frequent recourse to snippets from Bukowski’s own writings alert us to this director’s essential problem. The film probably shouldn’t have been made. Bukowski has never really translated entirely successfully to the screen. He’s a creature of the book, his words painting the pictures we don’t need to see delivered any other way.
But, as said, Ferreri gives it his best shot, and though no one really liked this film much at the time (Bukowski certainly didn’t), this has to be up there as the best adaptation of Bukowski.
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© Steve Morrissey 2024
