‘Curb Your Enthusiasm’s’ Second Banana Takes the Lead in Ode to Second City

As manager of foot-in-the-mouth Larry David and husband of profanity-in-the-mouth Susie Essman on “Curb Your Enthusiasm,” Jeff Garlin has proved to be the perfect second banana. He’s an adept complementary actor, one who’s funny in his own right yet never pushes himself into the spotlight as he helps bring a comic scene to fruition.

So perhaps it’s no surprise that when Garlin gets to run his own show _ as star, writer, director and co-producer of the low-budget movie “I Want Someone To Eat Cheese With” _ he provides ample opportunities for his fellow cast members to shine, even to the point of reducing his own role in his own semi-autobiographical film.

Garlin is self-aware enough to acknowledge this point in his audio commentary on the just-released DVD of “Cheese,” which had a limited theatrical run last year after debuting on the festival circuit in 2006.

“I had to change the movie a little bit as I was cutting it,” Garlin says, “because (co-producer) Steve Pink said there wasn’t enough of me in the movie and I was driving the movie.”

Garlin stars as James Aaron, a Chicagoan still sharing an apartment with his mother, who has three major, and interrelated, problems _ he’s struggling as an actor, needs to lose weight and hasn’t had a romantic relationship in years.

“Cheese” takes viewers on a leisurely, episodic journey as Garlin confronts, avoids or wallows in these respective problems. A real-life veteran of Chicago’s Second City improv troupe, Garlin fills his movie with many Second City actors and alumni, some well-known, such as Bonnie Hunt as one of James’ possible love interests, Dan Castellaneta (the voice of Homer Simpson) as a convenience store owner, Amy Sedaris as a nutty school guidance counselor; and others less familiar, including Mina Kolb, who portrays James’ mother (and has also been Garlin’s mom on “Curb Your Enthusiasm”) and David Pasquesi, who plays James’ best friend.

James is a Second City member who’s always looking for additional acting jobs. One particularly funny sequence has him working on a lousy TV show called “Smear Job” _ sort of a “Candid Camera” meets “Punk’d” reality show _ for a sleazy producer (played by director Paul Mazursky). On his commentary, Garlin reports, “I really was on a practical joke show for CBS called `Dirty Work,’ an evil, evil show where I made people cry. I quit (after making) the pilot.”

James’ difficulties with food have him repeatedly bemoaning his physical state, attending an Overeaters Anonymous meeting, which he sneaks out of to go to an ice cream parlor, and alternating between bingeing on Ho-Ho’s and starving on cottage cheese.

As Garlin says on his commentary, “Of all the things in the movie that are true, the food stuff is the most true.”

Romantically, he gets involved with a problematic, dangerous but gorgeous younger woman (played very believably by Sarah Silverman), to whom James says, warily but not warily enough, “You’re a huge-time hottie and I am Baron Von Fat. And you’re a little bit crazy.”

Fortunately for James, Bonnie Hunt’s schoolteacher character, who shares with him a love for jazz musician Ben Webster, makes a much better romantic fit.

“I wrote all these parts for my friends, who I think are wonderful actors,” says Garlin. And while the majority of the movie was scripted, a lot of scenes were not, and having Second City veterans who are skilled at improvisation gives the movie a relaxed, natural feel.

Although always complimentary of the performances by his cast, Garlin can be tough on his own work as a first-time director.

“I wish that I could have made this scene more interesting visually,” he says at one point in his commentary. “Two guys sitting in chairs in an old people’s home doesn’t exactly get your blood going.”

That’s true. But as an ode to his hometown of Chicago, a shout-out to Second City and a humorous tour of Jeff Garlin’s nuances and neuroses, “I Want Someone To Eat Cheese With” is a sweet and engaging movie. Watching it won’t change your life, but you’ll be pleased to have seen it.

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Another film made by a writer-director who also plays the leading role, Allen Baron’s “Blast of Silence,” is also out on DVD this week (Criterion Collection, $29.95, not rated). But this semi-documentary study of a hit man, from 1961, is worlds apart thematically and stylistically from Jeff Garlin’s light comedy.

One of the last American film noirs shot in black-and-white, “Blast of Silence” is cited by critic Terrence Rafferty, in an essay accompanying the DVD, as a pioneering low-budget independent film, along with John Cassavetes’ “Shadows” (1959) and Shirley Clarke’s “The Connection” (1960).

The movie tells _ or more precisely, a second-person narrator (Lionel Stander, the great gravel-voiced actor whose career ran from the 1930s to the 1990s) tells _ the story of a Cleveland hit man named Frank Bono (Baron) who’s been hired to whack a midlevel New York mobster.

Beginning with Bono’s emergence from a train at Penn Station, the film shows the hit man painstakingly going about his business _ renting a hotel room, obtaining his initial payment in a meeting on the Staten Island Ferry, procuring a gun with a silencer, tailing his target for several days until he finds a suitable place to attempt the assassination. Baron plays Bono as a guarded, very private man for whom any human interaction is difficult and stressful.

“Blast of Silence” will be a revelation to many film fans, myself included, who did not know of its existence until now. Yet the movie’s back story is almost as interesting.

Stander was blacklisted at the time he delivered his narration, and he wasn’t even credited when the film was originally released. The cynical and oddly poetic narration was written by Waldo Salt, another blacklistee, using the pseudonym Mel Davenport. (After the blacklist ended, Salt won Oscars for his screenplays for “Midnight Cowboy” and “Coming Home,” while Stander went on to appear as a regular in the TV series “Hart to Hart,” among many other credits.)

As for Baron’s later career, we learn from Rafferty’s essay and several DVD special features that he moved to Los Angeles after making “Blast of Silence,” directed three feature films that remain virtually unheard of today (“Terror in the City,”"Outside In” and “Foxfire Light”) and directed many episodes of TV shows both awful (“The Dukes of Hazzard,”"The Love Boat,”"Charlie’s Angels”) and decent (“Kolchak: The Night Stalker,”"Cagney & Lacey”).

In the DVD documentary “Requiem for a Killer: The Making of `Blast of Silence,’” which includes an interview Baron gave to a German television crew in the early 1990s, he says that perhaps he should have remained in New York and continued making films like “Blast of Silence” instead of the TV work that consumed his career.

Shot on New York City streets at Christmastime and quickly paced by Meyer Kupferman’s jazzy score, “Blast of Silence” makes the job of a hitman seem lonely, cold and real. There’s no Tarantinoesque glamour here.

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I WANT SOMEONE TO EAT CHEESE WITH

3 stars

CAST: Jeff Garlin, Sarah Silverman, Bonnie Hunt, David Pasquesi, Mina Kolb, Amy Sedaris and Dan Castellaneta

WRITER-DIRECTOR: Jeff Garlin

DISTRIBUTOR: Genius Products

Not rated

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BLAST OF SILENCE

3 stars

CAST: Allen Baron, Molly McCarthy, Larry Tucker and Peter H. Clune

NARRATOR: Lionel Stander (uncredited)

WRITER-DIRECTOR: Allen Baron

NARRATION WRITER: Waldo Salt (credited to Mel Davenport)

DISTRIBUTOR: Criterion Collection

Not rated

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Bruce Dancis: bdancis@sacbee.com

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