Lenny and Bruce

Lenny, the film biography of Lenny Bruce, is meant to be honest—like Lenny himself. And it is—in the same circumspectly bold way Bruce was. It cuts from interviews with his survivors and segments of his nightclub acts to flashbacks of his private life. There are strip joints, drugs, vomiting, a bloody auto accident, foul language (and I don’t mean “pee-pee”), and sex. In the latter category one must place the scene where young Lenny and Honey Bruce are in bed, she (Valerie Perrine) naked, he (Dustin Hoffman, not risking being upstaged) dressed, she moaning ohhh-ohhhhhh, he expertly kissing her midriff, that most flammable of erogenous zones in R-rated movies. . . . Later (cut ahead to mature Lenny in nightclub) he proclaims he’d rather his little girl saw a stag movie than a shoot-’em-up, because love is beautiful, whereas violence, etc. . . . Still later (flash back to young Lenny and Honey and another naked young woman) there’s a little kinkiness, Mrs. Bruce and Mlle. Troisième fondling each other’s breasts, their hands working their way inexorably to each other’s midriffs. . . . But (cut ahead to mature Lenny in courtroom) such gamboling never goes on so long or so far from Lenny’s raunchy sermons on hypocrisy as to make you wonder about its relevance, or its redeeming social value, but of course the stony-faced old judge can’t dig it at all, man, but you and I know, don’t we, that Lenny’s telling it like it is: as the world will one day realize, but alas (cut to Lenny’s place, where—sirens and flashbulbs—Lenny’s nude, needle-pocked corpse has been discovered) too late. . . . Finis, lights up, and the audience, stunned but edified, trudges out.

Lenny has been accused of falsifying its subject, and the charge is no doubt just. What is equally important is that it falsifies him in a way he would have approved of. It lies, but the lie is also his lie. He was the one who purveyed the notion that his obscenity was prophecy; and he would have approved too of the film’s implicit assertion that his squalid junkie’s death was a martyrdom. How fitting that he is still quoted by such one-up exegetes of the Zeitgeist as Nat Hentoff and Garry Wills. How fitting, too, that the film is shot in black and white, intending what is called authenticity, but achieving instead a grimily didactic melodrama, in which the villains are Bruce’s absurd persecutors, the judges and cops and tight lipped old jurors who are representative of this “hypocritical society” (Lenny’s phrase).

JS

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Joseph Sobran

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Lenny, the film biography of Lenny Bruce, is meant to be honest—like Lenny himself. And it is—in the same circumspectly bold way Bruce was. It cuts from interviews with his survivors and segments of his nightclub acts to flashbacks of his private life. There are strip joints, drugs, vomiting, a bloody auto accident, foul language (and I don’t mean “pee-pee”), and sex. In the latter category one must place the scene where young Lenny and Honey Bruce are in bed, she (Valerie Perrine) naked, he (Dustin Hoffman, not risking being upstaged) dressed, she moaning ohhh-ohhhhhh, he expertly kissing her midriff, that most flammable of erogenous zones in R-rated movies. . . . Later (cut ahead to mature Lenny in nightclub) he proclaims he’d rather his little girl saw a stag movie than a shoot-’em-up, because love is beautiful, whereas violence, etc. . . . Still later (flash back to young Lenny and Honey and another naked young woman) there’s a little kinkiness, Mrs. Bruce and Mlle. Troisième fondling each other’s breasts, their hands working their way inexorably to each other’s midriffs. . . . But (cut ahead to mature Lenny in courtroom) such gamboling never goes on so long or so far from Lenny’s raunchy sermons on hypocrisy as to make you wonder about its relevance, or its redeeming social value, but of course the stony-faced old judge can’t dig it at all, man, but you and I know, don’t we, that Lenny’s telling it like it is: as the world will one day realize, but alas (cut to Lenny’s place, where—sirens and flashbulbs—Lenny’s nude, needle-pocked corpse has been discovered) too late. . . . Finis, lights up, and the audience, stunned but edified, trudges out.

Lenny has been accused of falsifying its subject, and the charge is no doubt just. What is equally important is that it falsifies him in a way he would have approved of. It lies, but the lie is also his lie. He was the one who purveyed the notion that his obscenity was prophecy; and he would have approved too of the film’s implicit assertion that his squalid junkie’s death was a martyrdom. How fitting that he is still quoted by such one-up exegetes of the Zeitgeist as Nat Hentoff and Garry Wills. How fitting, too, that the film is shot in black and white, intending what is called authenticity, but achieving instead a grimily didactic melodrama, in which the villains are Bruce’s absurd persecutors, the judges and cops and tight lipped old jurors who are representative of this “hypocritical society” (Lenny’s phrase).