Overcoming fear: Jerry Goldsmith in the 1960s

“I think that the great part of creativity is overcoming fear. Fear is a given. When you sit down and have to begin something, don’t be afraid to be filled with fear, because it goes with the turf.” — Jerry Goldsmith

By Scott Ross

One of the abiding sorrows of my life is that, while I am intensely musical I play no instrument and, although I would rather sing than do almost anything else, cannot read music, or in any case can do so only in the most rudimentary fashion. As in: I see the notes rise and fall on the staff, so know they’re either higher, or lower. Higher or lower than what, though, I couldn’t necessarily say. I enjoy a fairly eclectic blend of music, a variety which takes in concert works (I loathe the catch-all term “Classical” except when applied to the actual Classical era, which it seldom does); theatre scores (the odious, and largely ignorant, phrase “Show Tunes” will never pass either my lips or my typing fingers), especially those by Arlen, Gershwin, Bernstein and Sondheim; a few essential singers (Billie Holiday, Peggy Lee, Barbra Streisand and Barbara Cook) who are sui generis — art song purveyors in the guise of pop singers; some folk (Pete Seeger and The Weavers especially); a smattering of pop and funk (Paul Simon, Harry Nilsson and Rufus Wainwright are demigods for me, and I am still partial to the Top 40 of my childhood and early adolescence, which was refreshingly integrated in a way, in our now hyphenated existence, it no longer is); and a whole lot of jazz (Louis Armstrong is, for me, as close to a Supreme Deity as any pretend sky-god.) But what I tend to listen to most are film scores.

Miklós Rózsa

My personal Pantheon embraces Franz Waxman, whose early work, like The Bride of Frankenstein, did much to give us a grammar for movie scoring (Max Steiner got there slightly earlier, but, as with Eric Wolfgang Korngold, his scores tend to the stolid, the sentimental and the over-emphatic, with nothing like the compositional daring or the harmonic complexity that were Waxman’s stocks-in-trade); Alfred Newman and Dmitri Tiomkin, both capable of indifferent or bombastic work but whose masterpieces are as fine as anyone’s; Miklós Rózsa, the supreme classicist of the so-called Golden Age, without whom both Alfred Hitchcock and Billy Wilder would have been the poorer; Bernard Herrmann, the first great genius of the form, and a giant on whose shoulders virtually everyone who followed has stood; Carl Stalling, whose Warner Bros. cartoon scores took animation spotting to heights of playful, antic sublimity and whose best compositions (pace Daniel Goldmark) are as far from simple “Mickey Mousing” as it is possible to get;

Alex North with his “Honorary” Academy Award. Your compromise statuette when they won’t give you an actual award for your best work.

David Raksin, a minor deity, perhaps, but an important one, whose finest efforts, such as The Bad and the Beautiful and What’s the Matter with Helen? exhibit a stylistic range and a tonal flexibility that are considerable; Alex North, the first great modernist of the American film score, whose Spartacus is one of the glories of the moving-picture age; Nino Rota, who, even if hadn’t composed the score (and now-famous theme) for The Godfather would be a giant, if only for his work with Fellini;

Vic Mizzy, surrounded by some of the creatures for whom he wrote his memorable scores.

Jerome Moross, who despite some redundancy of style was a bracing composer of Americana; Laurence Rosenthal, whose lyricism is beyond reproach and whose score for The Miracle Worker is as close to transcendent as movie music gets; Henry Mancini, whose sound virtually defined his era but who, due to his penchant for producing easy-listening albums rather than soundtrack LPs, is still not taken as seriously as he had every right to be; John Barry, another era-definer, whose James Bond scores are infinitely richer than the series deserved and whose best work elsewhere (The Lion in Winter, Robin and Marian, Dances with Wolves) need apologize for nothing; Jerry Fielding, a fiercely idiosyncratic composer who, after years of blacklist, over-worked himself to an early grave; Vic Mizzy, whose Don Knotts efforts, particularly The Ghost and Mr. Chicken, are among the best comedy scores in movies; Georges Delerue, whose trademark lyricism is often breathtaking in its delicacy but who was also capable of both unsettling darkness and muscularity to more than match his contemporaries, without the slightest trace of bombast; Ennio Morricone, who is sometimes repetitious, and occasionally absolutely dreadful, but whose work for Sergio Leone (not to mention later masterworks like The Untouchables and The Mission) transcend their movies, and their genres; John Williams, whose more syrupy and/or emphatic excesses can be forgiven for any number of masterworks, from The Reivers to Munich (and including, of course, Jaws, Close Encounters of the Third Kind and the Star Wars series); Lalo Schifrin, so splendid at “cool,” jazzy atmosphere that it’s impossible to imagine McQueen’s Frank Bullitt or Eastwood’s Dirty Harry Callahan without him;

John Williams and friend.

and David Shire, whose limited output is in no way indicative of his gifts and whose incomparably rich score for Return to Oz is among the finest composed for any movie in the last 70 years.

A pair of masters, however, share my top spot: Elmer Bernstein and Jerry Goldsmith. When these twin giants, appallingly, took their leave within a month of each other in the summer of 2004, the art and craft of movie scoring received a blow to its very soul, one from which I doubt it will, or can, ever fully recover.

Elmer Bernstein in 1967. He never won for any of his great scores, only for scoring Thoroughly Modern Millie, which contained very little of his music.

For me, Bernstein’s loss hurt in a way that Goldsmith’s did not. Aside from his having been, by all accounts, a courtly and rather lovely man, the sheer emotional heft of his greatest work revealed a heart as expansive as any that ever beat. If I had to pick a single cue, by any film composer, as my favorite the choice would be, without question, the one labeled “End Title” in Bernstein’s To Kill a Mockingbird (but which is actually the music accompanying the final scene, end titles in those days seldom lasting more than 30 seconds.) Those final, elegiac, annealing chords, rising impossibly high before, finally, resolving themselves, gently yet decisively, never fail first to send chills of rapture up my spine and then to move me to shameless tears. It isn’t merely the perfect climax to that movie’s (indeed, that novel’s) story. It is, on its own, as close to perfection in emotional response, and release, as anything I’ve ever heard. It’s the music I’d want to be the last thing I ever hear in this life. Barring that, they can play it at my wake.

A young, and very handsome, Jerry Goldsmith in the mid-1960s. He had reason to smile.

Jerry Goldsmith’s scores seldom move me in quite that way, although he wrote an astounding number of peerlessly lovely themes and there are quite a few whose emotional qualities, beautifully controlled and never allowed to slip into bathos, are exemplars of the scorer’s art. Almost without exception — I’ll come to a few achingly singular examples by and by — these are from his scores for smaller movies, of the type Hollywood seldom makes now, and was making fewer and fewer of as Goldsmith’s life came to its close.

One is struck by the composer’s remarks on that subject, inasmuch as the bulk of Goldsmith’s best work was in the action or thriller genre, and he really excelled at Westerns. “I like the variety,” he was quoted as saying. “But basically my choice of films is a small intimate film [sic]. Quiet film, no action, just people in relationships. That’s what I like the most.” It’s telling how relatively few of these he (and Bernstein, who also excelled at them) actually scored. Did, as I suspect, the opportunities simply vanish? “When I get a fantasy film job,” Goldsmith noted, “the first thing I look for is the non-fantasy element to build the music upon. The human side of the film is what’s important, not the hardware. My work on Poltergeist is a perfect example. Most people saw it as a ghost story and a horror story. I saw it as a love story and wrote the music with that emotion in mind. There is no formula to finding what musically fits a science fiction film. I just look for the emotion. When I don’t find those, it makes things more difficult.” Judging from his later output, it must have been difficult much (if not most) of the time.

While Goldsmith had television (and radio) credits as early as 1954, his composing career only really began to build, and blossom, in the early 1960s.* The familiar, glorious Dr. Kildare opening is his, but his first important credit for movies was for one of those “small intimate films,” the melancholy Lonely Are the Brave, which its star Kirk Douglas has often called his favorite from among his own work. That same year (1962) Goldsmith was engaged by John Huston for Freud (aka, Freud: The Secret Passion) and for which he composed an enormously effective, somewhat atonal, score, which earned him the first of far too many nominations for Academy Awards he would ultimately lose.† The following year, and in a complete change of pace, Goldsmith wrote a deliciously sly, playful, Kurt Weillian score for Huston’s tongue-in-cheek Phillip MacDonald whodunit The List of Adrian Messenger which has, thankfully, recently been issued on a limited edition CD by Varèse Sarabande, one of several cottage outfits of varying sizes specializing in preserving American film scores, many of which (Intrada, Quartet, La-La Land, the now-defunct Film Score Monthly) also emphasize Goldsmithiana.

Somewhat surprisingly, Goldsmith did not receive an Academy nod for the much-nominated Lilies of the Field, a small, heartfelt work, although he was nominated for the subsequent Sidney Poitier drama A Patch of Blue. The composer received 18 nominations in all (Bernstein got 14) winning only once, for The Omen — a fine, if derivative, horror score, leaning heavily on faux-Stravinsky via Gregorian vocalese (Symphony of Psalms seems a particular antecedent), but nowhere close to his best work.‡ Could Goldsmith’s peers have seriously imagined this was his only award-worthy score, or that it was in some way superior to The Sand Pebbles, Chinatown, Islands in the Stream, The Wind and the Lion, Lionheart, Poltergeist or even The Secret of NIMH? Granting that those are highly personal choices, I submit that any one of them displays greater emotionality and more daring, even wit, than the highly popular, and influential, Omen.

The Washington, D.C.-based political thriller Seven Days in May (1964) elicited from Goldsmith an appropriately spare, brief, martial score and the same year’s Western Rio Conchos one of the composer’s most insistent, melodic earworms of a theme as well as some terrifically expansive, muscular action cues. For Our Man Flint, a cheerfully ridiculous Bond spoof starring a relaxed and genial James Coburn, Goldsmith offered up some delicious, tongue-in-cheek spy-pop and, for its sequel (the punningly titled In Like Flint) a riotously and deliberately inane theme-song — lyric by Leslie Bricusse — “Your Zowie Face” (Z.O.W.I.E. is the organization Flint works for.) Von Ryan’s Express (1965) has some splendid things in it as well, as does The Blue Max of 1966 with its soaring main theme, although one can point here to Waxman’s superb The Spirit of St. Louis as an obvious point of sonic reference.

No such niggling comparisons obtain for Goldsmith’s early magnum opus, The Sand Pebbles (also 1966.) While the movie itself, for all its seriousness of purpose and remarkably epic qualities, is a lamentable diminution of the magnificent Richard McKenna novel, its thinness exacerbated by the disastrous miscasting of the intolerably unresponsive Candice Bergen and the almost incredibly overrated, and terminally blank, Steve McQueen in the central roles. But that score! Along with two lovely, and ultimately heart-wrenching supporting performances by Mako and Richard Attenborough, it is left largely to Goldsmith to provide the unsettling dramatic thrust, the aching melancholy and the almost unbearable emotional underpinning the story needs in order fully to convey the results of the tragic confluence of imperialist misadventure and explosive social upheaval. The cue “Death of a Thousand Cuts,” for Mako, is one of the most emotionally wrenching things of its kind in the composer’s oeuvre, a track that continues to move the listener as much on the dozenth play-through as on the first. The Sand Pebbles is Goldsmith’s first undeniably great work for the movies, a score so intriguing, so layered, and so fraught with aching humanity that it has been released numerous times, in incrementally superior editions the last of which, on Intrada (and which contains the score as heard in the movie as well as the contents of the re-recorded “soundtrack” of the period) belongs in the library of every serious movie music aficionado.

For Hour of the Gun, a rather good 1967 variation on the Wyatt Earp legend starring James Garner, Jason Robards and the great Robert Ryan, Goldsmith composed a terrific genre score. (Choice cuts: The arresting main theme and the curiously un-punctuated “Whose Cattle.”) 1968 saw the arrival of another milestone Goldsmith score, for Planet of the Apes. The composer had flirted before with electronica, but had not fully explored its possibilities for appropriately otherworldly sounds until this one, although the best cues (“The Hunt” and “No Escape”) are, in the main, more traditional in composition and orchestration. Goldsmith would, in future, lean too heavily on augmented instrumentation for my taste; I admit to a decided prejudice against synthesizers and related musical hardware over sounds produced by human players — the only really good synthesized film score I’ve ever encountered is Arthur B. Rubinstein’s for Blue Thunder — but I defy anyone to seriously defend the “superiority” of the lamentable Hoosiers over even such minor achievements as, say, Rudy or Deep Rising.

In 1969 Goldsmith returned to television, composing the gentle, memorably optimistic theme, and some of the early scores, for the excellent, laugh-trackless comedy-drama (as they used to be called in those antediluvian days before the hideous neologism “dramedy” was, like the voice of the turtle, incessantly heard throughout the land) Room 222. He also scored the absurd but exciting Gregory Peck thriller The Chairman, and the Cukor-directed misfire Justine. For this transliteration of one-fourth of Lawrence Durrell’s Alexandria Quartet, Goldsmith contributed a vivid, enticing, spirited score in which sitar, auto harp and recorder, added to an already rich orchestral palette, evoke eroticism, exoticism and terror equally, and equally well.

At the very beginning of the next decade Jerry Goldsmith would not necessarily become a household name, but he would compose a single theme that, like Herrmann’s shower murder and John Williams’ shark music, very quickly achieved nearly universal identification and in Goldsmith’s case, instantly reminding listeners of that film, its star, and the movie’s towering, contradictory real-life subject…

See also Enlarging the Scope: Jerry Goldsmith in the 1970s

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* Goldsmith composed a splendid, trumpet-driven theme for one of the quirkiest of all Westerns (and perhaps of all radio dramas) “Frontier Gentleman” starring the redoubtable, and very busy, John Dehner.

† Does anyone really think The Omen, good as it is, Goldsmith’s best score? Possibly only the same people who would likewise rate Bernstein’s incidental music for his only Oscar-winner, Thoroughly Modern Millie.

‡ Few so-called film critics, who know as little about music as they do about acting, direction, cinematography, plays, literature, history or any of the other, myriad aspects that go into making the art, ever single Goldsmith out for praise. Or, if they do, as did John Simon in his review of the 1974 Chinatown, may be capable, as Simon was a scant two years later in a critique of The Omen, of making reference to “that pretentious hack Jerry Goldsmith.” He’s done this sort of thing repeatedly in his criticism, to the point where I wonder if Simon, whom I often admire in spite of his militant ugliness of spirit, has a peculiarly selective memory. Goldsmith cannot be an artist one year, a hack the next. Which is it, Simon?

Text copyright 2014 by Scott Ross

A dirty shade of gray: “Testimony” (1988)

“For some reason, people think that music must tell us only about the pinnacles of the human spirit, or at least about highly romantic villains. Most people are average, neither black nor white. They’re gray. A dirty shade of gray. And it’s in that vague gray middle ground that the fundamental conflicts of our age take place.”
— Dmitri Shostakovich (Attributed, in the still-disputed 1979 memoir Testimony, edited by Solomon Volkov)

By Scott Ross

Thankfully, the Tony Palmer/David Rudkin film of Testimony (1988) is not notably gray, at least in its visual tone. In Nic Knowland’s sumptuous cinematography, it is for the most part brilliantly, adamantly, gloriously black-and-white. I doubt there had been a more strikingly lit and photographed monochromatic movie, at the time of Testimony’s late ’80s release, since Gordon Willis’ rapturous work on Manhattan nine years earlier. The film is also, despite some longueurs and a smattering of symbolic pretension, as strikingly and exhilaratingly cinematic as the best work of Orson Welles and Martin Scorsese.

I first saw Testimony on PBS in the spring of 1990 and was so taken with it I watched it over again when it was repeated a few days later. Seeing it a third time, I am fully persuaded that, if not the finest attempt to explicate that essentially unknowable enigma we call the artistic temperament, it is certainly among the tiny minority of victors in the field. (Perhaps that is why Leonard Maltin, who hasn’t an artistic bone in his body, hated it: “Turgid narrative.”) What it is not is in any sense a standard, or even atypical, example of that almost entirely useless stock entity, the “biopic.” In my immediate experience as a moviegoer, only Warren Beatty and Trevor Griffith’s Reds and Scorsese and John Logan’s The Aviator truly broke out of that mold, even if the latter expunged the bisexuality of Howard Hughes and the former both obliterated John Reed’s similar eroticism and overdid the deathless heterosexual romance. Nor is Reds incidental to Testimony: In Reds the Revolution first inspires excitement then dismantles it as the Socialist reverie crumbles in internecine sectarianism and totalitarianist brutality. In Testimony, there is no passionate optimism; the dream has already soured to a waking nightmare.

Testimony is impressionistic, fractured and superbly aligned to the music of its subject, in a sense approximating its rhythms in optic/dramatic terms. What is also, unavoidably and understandably, black and white, are the crushing, homicidal Stalinist system that encompassed the arc of Shostakovich’s life and career, and the chilling understatement of Terence Rigby’s Stalin, who more than represents it. Ben Kinglsey’s Dmitri sees his friends and neighbors disappear — or rather, doesn’t — with a hideous regularity and his own position as the primary composer of Soviet Socialism grandly raised and debilitatingly stymied depending on official whim or pleasure. That we never see Stalin give the order is incidental, his approval implicit; nothing that happened to Uncle Joe’s favorite composer, good or bad, could have without it.

Although Palmer and the playwright Rudkin (the latter of whom wrote the bracingly intelligent screenplay) eschew any overt depiction of bloodshed — Stalin was responsible for upward of 30 million murders of Russian citizens, effectively making Hitler a piker — the threat of it is seldom far from the surface, both in our minds and in the composer’s. Kingsley’s understated and ironic posthumous voice-overs fill in a few details, such as the arrest and execution of Vsevolof Meyerhold (Robert Stephens) and of the official purging of Shostakovich’s great friend Mikhail Tukhachevsky (Ronald Pickup) and his seeming detachment, coupled with an incisive visual or two, chills the blood far more effectively than would the display of viscera. Indeed, the movie’s most terrifying moment consists of a static shot of a lighted window and the retraction of all other sound as Shostakovich describes the horrendous murder of Meyerhold’s wife, her screams as her eyes are cut out by the knives of her sanctioned killers deliberately silenced just as they were undoubtedly heard but assiduously ignored by her neighbors, waiting in hushed terror for the midnight knock on their own apartment doors. The only exception to this assiduous avoidance of violence is Palmer’s use of documentary footage of Holocaust dead late in the movie, and that is as it should be: No depiction of screen violence, however realistic, could quite compare to that appalling reality, and might, by contrast, only seem obscenely trivial.

Palmer’s framing is uncannily apt throughout and his long, involved tracking shots are not mere technical ostentation; they capture the composer’s resolute, practiced treks through the grubby mazes of Soviet bureaucracy, accompanied, always, by perfectly selected excerpts from Shostakovich’s oeuvre. The director, who also edited, seems to have shot Testimony to music rather than the usual reverse. (The score was performed by the London Philharmonic and conducted by Rudolf Barsha, occasionally on-camera, and in color.) There are a few surreal moments, such as the composer playing a bizarre Constructivist piano, and while these flights of fancy occasionally feel oppressively symbolic, they are less important than Shostakovich’s own fluctuating fortunes, and his ultimate survival.

What Testimony gets absolutely right, in concept, design, and production and in Kingsley’s magnificent performance, is the everyday horror of a system that murders its citizens as effectively with words as with knives. The long central sequence of the official 1948 denunciation of Shostakovich and others by that uniquely dangerous and self-important ignoramus Zhdanov (John Shrapnel) and the composer’s own shamefaced and public self-censure, depicted on the movie’s poster, is perhaps the finest explication of helpless artistic degradation in Western movie history. The later, stomach-churning scene of Shostakovich’s squirming equivocation in America, then, is, despite its effectiveness, almost anticlimactic: The dirty gray death of his soul has already been accomplished; the rest is just the body’s discomfort at still having to go on.

Ben Kinglsey as Dmitri Shoshtakovich.

Text copyright 2014 by Scott Ross

Wherein I wish I was in Hell with my back broken: “New Faces” (1954)

By Scott Ross

I finally sat down this week with the Critics’ Choice DVD of New Faces, the 1954 CinemaScope movie of the popular Leonard Sillman revue New Faces of 1952. I may never recover. To paraphrase Churchill rather horribly, seldom have so many done so much to so little effect.

Hirschfeld captures New Faces. Looks like a fun show, doesn’t it? Well, looks can be deceiving.

Jimmy Thiem in The Little Foxes at Raleigh Little Theatre in 1952. He looked very much the same when I knew him, between 1979 and 1990.

I was introduced to the cast recording of the show in my late teens or early 20s by my friend Jimmy Thiem, who has, I am sorry to say, since joined the majority. Jimmy, who before I met him owned a much-loved record shop (ask your grandparents) in Raleigh, NC, was my guide to many of the older Broadway musicals. I knew the big ones, of course, or at least knew of them. Jimmy filled in the gaps. (I owe him especially for sharing Finian’s Rainbow, thus making me a lifelong convert to The Church of Yip Harburg and Burton Lane, and for The Most Happy Fella.) He was mad about New Faces, so I dutifully picked up a copy. I wish I could have told Jimmy I liked it as much as he did, but the fact is I was not so much underwhelmed as barely whelmed.

I loved one of the songs, was mildly impressed with others, indifferent to most, and loathed more than a couple. It may have been one of those cases of “You had to be there,” but the talent behind the show, and on the stage (and the LP) was in many ways remarkable for their collective staying power, and for what they would achieve in the future: Sheldon Harnick, Mel(vin) Brooks, Paul Lynde, Alice Ghostley, Carol Lawrence, Ronny Graham and (there’s no other word for her, sorry) the fabulous Eartha Kitt.

Oh, yeah: And Robert Clary. More on him anon.

Many of the songs must have seemed old hat to a lot of people even then. Some of them have pretty tunes, especially those by Arthur Siegel, later known to a generation of musical aficionados for his collaborations with the very strange Ben Bagley on the latter’s sometimes useful, often risible, Revisited LP series. But the lyrics nearly always let you down. Siegel’s “Love is a Simple Thing” (lyrics by June Carroll) has, initially, a pleasing rhyme-scheme, perhaps a little too reminiscent of Hugh Martin’s “Love” for comfort, but the words, like the tune, trail off into nothingness. “Time for Tea” contains a nice idea — two elderly spinsters cautioning the listener not to miss the opportunity for happiness — and then galumphs along in a seemingly endless flashback until you’re ready to cry, “Enough!” Or take “Penny Candy”: Again, a plangent idea (the little ache of longing we feel for childhood pleasures we have since outgrown) and an interesting composition, both of which get mired in ennui, especially when the hopelessly trivial dialogue interrupts. Only Siegel’s “Monotonous,” performed with exquisitely bored eroticism by Kitt, really works. Not that its lyrics are as clever as they might be, nor the music as ineluctably soignée as it thinks it is. It all begins to sound too much like cast-off Cole Porter, although he’s far from a bad target at which to aim your artistic sights. Michael Brown’s hoedown “Lizzie Borden” likewise exudes a whiff of must; Tom Lehrer would do this sort of thing much better, and with infinitely greater — dare I say slashing? — wit, a couple of years later.

The great Alice Ghostley in full cry.

Of the ballads, only Murray Grand’s gently sardonic “Guess Who I Saw Today?” stands out. But the show’s best number, by far, is Harnick’s deliciously wry “Boston Beguine.” My affection for the song, a riotously, rapturously absurd paean to doomed romance, is not mere 20/20 hindsight. Here, composer/lyricist and performer meet in one of those rare confluences of enormous talent, even genius, that both promises a golden future and is giddily superb on its own. What makes the number treasurable, aside from Ghostley’s unerring comic touch and sparkling lyric soprano, is Harnick’s playful intelligence. He alone saw something potentially funny in the very nature of the beguine itself, and his juxtaposition of that slightly studied passion with a set of lyrics bemoaning the incongruously hilarious setting (“We went to the Casbah/That’s an Irish bar there/The underground hideout/Of the D.A.R. there…”) is, even this early in his career, masterly. I’d hate to have to been the poor schmucks in the show who had to follow that one.

Now to the movie. And abandon hope, all ye who enter there.

I won’t dignify the alleged director of this indigestible mulligatawny by mentioning his name. Trust me, you’ve never heard of him. Although New Faces is essentially a filmed performance, sans audience, someone had the (to him, I presume, brilliant, but actually thrice-baked) notion of setting off the numbers with a loathsome, idiotic “backstage” framing story and, having had it, resolutely stuck to the damn thing. Perhaps it was felt that a movie audience wouldn’t accept a filmed revue without some narrative, however tenuous or anemic. That’s no excuse. But there is worse, far worse, to come: He, or they, also built up Robert Clary as if he was France’s answer to Sinatra and Jerry Lewis, all in one foul, diminutive package.

June Carroll’s restrained and knowing rendition of “Guess Who I Saw Today” got the ax, but considering the overall cloddish conception and the inept manner in which the movie was shot, that may have been a blessing for her, and for her composer. Infinitely more appalling is the way Ghostley’s “Boston Beguine” is utterly ruined by long cutaway shots of Clary, made up as a teenager (or perhaps a little boy, who can tell?) lying on the grass of what I assume is Boston Common and making a complete cul of himself. I can’t begin to imagine how Ghostley felt when she saw the results, but for me, this is one of the gravest crimes against decency, wit, and performance in the entire history of the movie musical. And that includes the Village People, and El Brendel.

Ghostley and Clary at the cast album recording session. Presumably she’s picking nits; Lord knows he behaves as if he’s feral.

Clary is nearly beyond human endurance throughout. He mugs to the furthest balcony, hurls every over-sold emotion and steel-belted note like a berserk Al Jolson (if that isn’t redundant), scampers and grimaces and poses and flits about with juvenile abandon until you want to throttle him, and generally shows off what we have to assume is his thorough (and utterly misguided) inner conviction of his own adorableness. God knows the French did themselves no favors by embracing Lewis, but even they did not deserve Robert Clary. Ronny Graham is almost as obnoxious, especially in his inane and lugubrious commingling of Tennessee Williams and Truman Capote (whose surname Virginia De Luce mangles — deliberately? — as “Kah-pōte.”) Graham just skirts parity with Clary in the insufferability sweepstakes, but only because he gets less screen time.

Blessedly, Kitt gets to perform “C’est si bon” and Francis Lemarque’s “Bal Petit Bal,” and to commit her ineffable rendition of Phil Springer’s “Santa Baby” (added to the show late in its run) to celluloid. But her delectable version of “Monotonous” is, like “Beguine,” sabotaged, this time by an abrupt cut to that leaden backstage story, just as the song builds to its climax. When your director is intent on killing your performance, not even the most brilliant singer/comedian can triumph.

Even an inveterate one-time Paul Lynde fan such as myself finds slim (or is it overfed?) pickings here. Lynde’s African monologue was familiar to me from his early live album of uniformly gruesome, would-be black-comic sketches that, taken on their own, make me wonder how the hell he ever got to be a household name. The nasty tone toward, and the xenophobic ugliness about, Africans makes this one of those artifacts one watches with a numbing dread, and the Brooks-written spoof of Clifford Odets and Arthur Miller, unfunny in itself, is made fully unpalatable by Lynde’s staggeringly inapt over-acting. Brooks himself might have actually been subtler. (Although I doubt even he could have made this particular joke funny.)

The print on the Critics’ Choice disc is as atrocious as the content, the color faded and, occasionally, flashing from a saturated yellow to a weird pea green every few seconds. I gather the later VCI Entertainment DVD is no better. But even if it were, it would take a desperation for entertainment bordering on the suicidal for me to sit through this mélange of witless excess — in which even the redoubtable Richard Barstow contributes dances of yawn-inducing, style-less obviousness and for which Raoul Pene Du Bois could not conjure up more than a series of threadbare and moldy “sets” — ever, ever again.

I don’t know the precise answer to the ages-old question of what killed the musical revue, but this movie surely had a hand in its demise.

I wouldn’t be surprised to discover it carried Plague.

Text copyright 2014 by Scott Ross

That sinking feeling: Waiting for the epithet (Or, “Frickin’ Faggot!”)

By Scott Ross

In my 1930s Hollywood play The Dogs of Foo, the character Paul Lehrmann, based slightly on George Cukor, confronts his leading actress on the set of the movie they’re shooting. She’s just ordered Paul’s young assistant, whom she suspects, quite accurately, is also his lover, to carry a note for her. Paul steps in, reminding his star that “Johnny takes orders from me, Lita, not from you.”

“And what else does he take from you?” She snaps back. “Dick-tation?”

PAUL: Sooner or later, it always comes out, doesn’t it?
LITA: Paulie—
PAUL: Who needs vino for veritas?
LITA: I didn’t mean it, Paulie. I’m upset, I’m sorry.
PAUL: They always are — after they’ve said it. Never before, never during, but always, always after.

If you, as they say when pussyfooting, happen to be gay, much of your leisure time is spent waiting for that insidious and ever-hovering other shoe to drop. Especially when, as I do, you enjoy reading old novels and perusing old movies.

For the purposes of this essay, let us define “old” not as a month or two ago, or however long it now takes the average American to forget, or lose interest, in, anything, but as from, say, the early 1980s backward. Although as late as 2003, in The Frumious Bandersnatch, Ed McBain rather gratuitously — and falsely, I think — has a teenage girl singer think toward her music-video dance partner (when, asked by her how she looks in her fantasy get-up, he has the effrontery to reply, “Hot!”) the phrase “Frickin’ faggot.” That isn’t the character thinking, it’s the author.

No matter how sterling the qualities of the people involved, or how identifiably “liberal” they may be (not that I presume the author of the 87^th Precinct series was anything like) sooner or later the reader or viewer of an older novel or movie written or directed by someone whose work he or she is fond of is going to be hit with one of the many lurking epithets. Faggot. Queer. Sissy. Nance. Or, in the 1956 McBain entry The Mugger I began reading as I was pondering this very subject, “pansy.”

(“Faggot” shows up a few pages later. Why? Because the eponymous felon has the odd habit, after assaulting and robbing his female victims, of bowing from the waist and saying, “Clifford thanks you, madam.” It isn’t merely the strangeness of this post-violation ritual that elicits so much speculation concerning his sexuality but his very name. Clifford. Faggy, right? A real man would presumably call himself “Cliff.”)

Brock Peters in The Pawnbroker

Sometimes it isn’t the words themselves that you anticipate with dread but the characters — usually, although not always, peripheral. Yesterday afternoon I watched, with a friend, the 1965 movie of Edward Lewis’ The Pawnbroker. We were both flabbergasted by the unspoken allusions to queerdom in the film, and the inescapable sense we both had of a strange, coded homophobia in its undercurrent. First: The character of Rodriguez, the studiedly elegant gangster for whom Rod Steiger’s Shoah-haunted broker, Sol Nazerman, acts as a money-launderer. (Although he bears a Latin surname, the character is played by the unmistakably, and I think beautifully, African-looking Brock Peters. But let that pass…) In Rodriguez’s first on-screen appearance, we see him waited upon by a young blond man. At the climax of his second, a pivotal scene in which he cajoles, threatens and humiliates Nazerman, the young white man again appears and climbs the staircase of Rodriguez’ large and well-appointed apartment. Rodriguez trails him up the steps, in what to our rather dazed eyes could only be an indication that the pair is ascending to the bedroom.

Second: The aging, heavily-set and curiously undulating dancer at the club Nazerman’s assistant (Jaime Sánchez) goes to with his black girlfriend (Thelma Oliver) and who is revealed at the end of her set to be a middle-aged drag-queen. Third: Among the many Harlem regulars who appear in Nazerman’s shop hoping to barter furnishings and personal items to make their untenable present just a jot less desperate is a man of indeterminate age — he might be anywhere from 30 to 50 — who brings in, first, an award he won from a field of (he says) 22,000 entrants and, later, a pair of bronzed baby shoes we can only assume were his own. Although neither this character nor the un-credited actor who plays him exactly screams “Fag!” I suspect it would take a veritable social hermit to miss the implications. And at least, unlike Rodriguez, this sad, defeated specimen of lower-depths humanity is not a threat, and in his touching hopefulness at the prospect of digging out yet one small turnip from a diminishing store to sustain his otherwise hopeless existence he is no different from the lonely, intellectual and prating elderly gentleman played by the great Juano Hernandez who comes to Nazerman’s pawnshop less to scare up a few pfennigs than to connect, however tenuously, with another human being. Nor, indeed from any of Sol’s downtrodden regulars.

Charles Dierkop, with a plethora of penis substitutes, in The Pawnbroker.

This brings us to the fourth, and by far most disturbing, example of the seamy homo underbelly of The Pawnbroker. Sánchez decides to kick over Nazerman’s safe and enlists the aid of an old associate, played by Raymond St. Jacques. The night before the theft we are given a glimpse of St. Jacques’ hoodlum pal, portrayed by the instantly identifiable, flat-nosed Charles Dierkop, playing with his pistol while thumbing through what in those antediluvian days, and to avoid legal entanglements with the U.S. Postal Service, were called “male physique” magazines. Did I mention that, in addition to clutching the gun, he’s holding another obvious penis substitute, in this case a harmonica, in his mouth? That’s rather overlarding the symbolism by half, isn’t it?

What was Lumet thinking? What, if these elements also make a showing in the novel, was Lewis? What the hell was everyone on?

Anent The Pawnbroker: Interestingly, in life — to use Orson Welles’ delightful phrase — both St. Jacques and Peters were themselves gay. (St. Jacques, notably closeted and ultimately a victim of AIDS, legally adopted his younger lover.) One wonders how they felt about all this. Especially as, at that time, being both black and actors was more than marginalization enough for one lifetime.

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Last winter I undertook a novel I’d long avoided, by one of the favorite writers of my youth: William Goldman’s Boys and Girls Together of 1964. While the author, interestingly, depicts only two heterosexual relationships among his quartet of main characters, and while none of these liaisons can in any reasonable way be called ideal (none of the boys or girls is a model of probity or psychic wellness) it is to the novel’s gay characters that the worst degradations accrue. In the preface to a recent reissue, Goldman admitted he’d done badly by them. But short of wholesale revision of the kind no author would wish to undertake on an old book — and certainly not in his 70s — I don’t see how even a writer of Goldman’s imagination could undo the damage. I do know I could have lived the rest of my life happily without reading that final chapter about Aaron. As it is, I doubt now I’ll ever be able to block out its deeply unpleasant memory.

Goldman is interesting in that his subsequent non-fiction book on the Broadway scene, The Season, constitutes one of the few important cases from the time (1968) of a heterosexual writer seriously considering the case of gay playwrights, the subterfuge most felt it necessary to indulge in at least as far as their work was concerned, and the prevailing pop culture of what Goldman would not have known then to call “heterosexism” that surrounded them. (Christopher Isherwood used to call the majority, not without reason, “the heterosexual dictatorship.”) Goldman’s was one of the rare calls for openness in that period, so I’m not singling him out for approbation. But for a man who (with his gifted brother James) was a one-time musical theatre librettist and who presumably both knew and worked with any number of homosexual men to get an entire novel’s worth of queer characters so wrong is telling.

It can be a relief of nearly Brobdingnagian  proportions when, in the middle of a popular novel of even recent antiquity, one encounters the slightest positive portrayal. In the late James Clavell’s series of Eastern novels (Shogun, Tai-Pan, Gai-Jin, etc.) the reader runs across homosexual characters with fair regularity and, while the Westerners in the books may express disgust or derision, their Japanese counterparts accept the difference with a shrug. One learns, after painful experience, to look (and feel disproportionately grateful) for the little things. In, for example, the decidedly heterosexual The Seven Year Itch (1955) George Axelrod and Billy Wilder have Marilyn Monroe casually mention the two men who live upstairs from her. They’re interior decorators, and never seen (making them even more invisible than the then most visible homo of the period, the faceless Sebastian Venable in Suddenly, Last Summer) and while their profession is certainly a coded inference of their being a couple of fags, at least they’re mentioned. Contrast this with Neil Simon who, a full decade later, has Paul in Barefoot in the Park sneer, “In Apartment C are the Boscos, Mr. And Mrs. J. Bosco [… ] A lovely young couple of the same sex. No one knows which one that is.” The queers-next-door are just there for a dirty snicker. The same year as Itch, Sal Mineo would create what is arguably the first important homosexual character in a mainstream movie, the doomed Plato of the gay Stewart Stern and the (possibly) bisexual Nicholas Ray’s influential Rebel Without a Cause, but again you have to pay fairly close attention; note, for example, the Alan Ladd pin-up in his high school locker. And since he’s only the queer-boy, Plato’s violent death isn’t even properly mourned by his best friend in that overrated potboiler’s ludicrous finale (“Mom, Dad… This is Judy…”)

Red River: John Ireland and Montgomery Clift compare firearms… I think.

While some very good writers — Ross MacDonald in his Lew Archer novels, for one — toss fags into the mix as an especially unsavory element of their rotgut ragouts, others, such as Raymond Chandler, seem to be working out more something personal, if coded to the point of the subliminal. Chandler was no friend to the faggot, yet one of his most deeply felt Philip Marlowe novels (The Long Goodbye) seems to hinge on Marlowe’s homoerotic friendship with Terry Lennox. They damn near meet-cute, and there is absolutely no reason for their instant liking of each other unless it involves the physical. Yet I feel sure that, like the man who made the best extant movie of one of his books, Chandler (or Marlowe, anyway) would have presented a knuckle-sandwich to anyone who suggested such a thing, just as Howard Hawks was known to dismiss film critics who commented on the nearly incessant, and occasionally risible, instances of intense male friendship in his movies: The infamous scene of John Ireland and Montgomery Clift comparing pistols in Red River springs (if you’ll pardon the expression) instantly to mind, and the entire, and central, Clift/John Wayne antagonism in that movie seems, pretty clearly, a sublimation of unspoken erotic and emotional desire.

The Maltese Falcon: Bogart as Spade with Elisha Cook, Jr. as Wilmur.

Recently, a good friend asked me if I found the gay characters in The Maltese Falcon offensive. I replied that, at least as far as the movie was concerned, I was more amused than anything else. It simply tickles me that, in 1941 John Huston (and in his debut as a writer-director, no less) actually got away with a supporting cast made up entirely of fairies: The lavender-scented Joel Cairo, the garrulous Kasper Gutman and, not incidentally, The Fat Man’s ephebe, Wilmer. It amuses me as well, as it did my friend, that so many ignoramuses have assumed the word “gunsel” was ’30s street patois for “cheap, gun-toting young hood,” and that it has come to mean that, when in fact it refers to a kept-boy: The passive partner in anal intercourse. Sam Spade knew it, and so did Wilmur; it’s why Wilmur gets so angry whenever Spade refers to him by that epithet. And as one who enjoys every subterfuge smart filmmakers used in those dread days of official, Catholic-driven, censorship, my delight when someone like Huston could pull the wool over the Breen Office’s collective eyes — busily gyrating as they were for any moist sign of immorality — far outweighs my sense of hurt.

But I appear to have wandered far afield. My point is that every gay reader, or viewer, knows, and dreads, that moment when a writer he admires or a movie he’s enjoying, turns against him… and turns in a more deeply unsettling way than against nearly any reader or viewer aside from women — who, unless they’re brain and/or soul-dead, or have otherwise inured themselves to insult, know that sinking sensation all too well: That soul-chilling moment when they do it to you again. That nano-second when you sense it coming, and cringe in advance, and hope against all hope that your instincts will be proven wrong. That stomach-churning instant when a writer or filmmaker instantaneously devolves from your erudite companion to your sudden, and very possibly lifelong, nemesis. And, unlike the actress in my play, they are never in the least sorry for it afterward.

As Paul Lehrmann asks, and answers, at the end of The Dogs of Foo, “Do you know the Hollywood definition of a faggot? A homosexual gentleman who’s just left the room.”

Text copyright 2014 by Scott Ross

Where love resides: Audrey Hepburn

By Scott Ross

In an especially charming scene in Billy Wilder and I.A.L. Diamond’s bittersweet 1957 romantic comedy Love in the Afternoon, an aging Gary Cooper murmurs to Audrey Hepburn that “everything about [her] is perfect.” Her response is immediate, and utterly characteristic:

Hepburn: I’m too thin! And my ears stick out, and my teeth are crooked, and my neck’s much too long.

Cooper: Maybe so, but I love the way it all hangs together.

So did Wilder. So did we all.

That exchange, of course, was written, but the voice is absolutely Hepburn’s. She did not see herself as (to employ a now overly utilized word) iconic, although she most certainly was. Neither did she regard herself as beautiful; those elements Wilder and Diamond explicate as comprising her beauty are likely the very ones Audrey herself would have cited as proofs against her own loveliness. And, since Wilder was noted for using, and elaborating upon, the on-and off-set behavior and utterances of his actors to spice his and Diamond’s deliberately incomplete screenplays (think of Shirley MacLaine’s plaintive query, “Why do people have to love people anyway?” and how they placed it in The Apartment, creating one of that excoriating comedy-drama’s most plangent moments) she may well have put it, to him, precisely that way. Actors are often almost shockingly unaware of their own unique gifts: Astonishingly, neither Steve Martin nor Dick Van Dyke considers himself a great physical clown. And Hepburn was sensitive about her appearance.

Above her remarkable looks, and her status as a fashion trendsetter — and, indeed, her very real range as an actor — what Audrey Hepburn had, to an exceptional degree, was charm. Bags of it, as the British say. It emanated from her as obviously, and as beguilingly, as scent from a rose. Philippe Halsman made a shrewd practice of photographing the famous in the act of jumping, the results creating an instant psychological profile. The most constricted, indeed constipated, were Richard Nixon’s; arguably, the most exuberant, and natural, were Hepburn’s.

These observations, I hope, go some way toward explaining why Hepburn was so uniquely accomplished, in spite of her considerable histrionic gifts, in romantic comedy: From her adorable and, ultimately heartbreaking, princess in that most fairy tale-like of Continental romances, Roman Holiday and the slightly sour Cinderella caprice Sabrina, to the lightly satirical Ugly Duckling musical Funny Face, and on through that perfect mixture of badinage and menace, Charade, the soufflé airiness of How to Steal a Million and the unerring emotional temperature of Frederick Raphael and Stanley Donen’s Two for the Road. Even when spectacularly mis-cast — and in a movie, Breakfast at Tiffany’s,* whose nearly inviolate wrong-headedness (Mickey Rooney as Mr. Yunioshi, anyone?) is somehow offset by its fabled, soigné sophistication and distinctive Mancini score, the two meeting to spectacular effect in the famous opening image of her reflected in the glass at Tiffany’s — Hepburn triumphs. She is no more the original author’s Lulamae Barnes than that other Hepburn is a creditable hillbilly in the notorious Spitfire.† She is, however, very much Truman Capote’s self-invented Holly Golightly in all her manufactured urbanity and mercurial emotionalism, seldom more heart-rending than when she learns of her adored brother’s death. Speaking of “the other Hepburn,” I have long felt that if Katharine was, as I believe, the finest American movie actress, Audrey was the greatest female movie star. That does not, however, mean that I do not believe in the younger Hepburn’s gifts as a performer; Cary Grant was likely the greatest of male movie stars, and although I judge his contemporary, James Stewart, as the finest of all masculine movie actors, that opinion takes nothing away from Grant, who (from Sylvia Scarlet on, anyway) was seldom less than splendid in whatever he did.

Photo by Popperfoto/Getty Images

Hepburn’s way with a throwaway line was nonpareil. Take, for instance, another delicious moment in Love in the Afternoon. Maurice Chevalier is a widowed private detective specializing in marital infidelity, Hepburn his beloved daughter. His case files, unknown to him, are his young progeny’s obsession, despite every effort on his part to shield her from “the sordid stuff” which is his stock-in-trade. She ripostes, “I bet when Mama was alive you told her what you were doing.”

Chevalier: Your mama was a married woman!
Hepburn (Smiling ingenuously): I’m so glad!

High among Hepburn’s idiosyncratic attributes was that indefinable, but wholly captivating, accent, a legacy of her bifurcated heritage (Scots father, Dutch mother). The enunciation is perfect, yet never studied, the impulses almost uncannily apt — think of the way she utters, in answer to Albert Finney’s troubled declaration of love near the end of Two for the Road, the simple statement “Well, then… well, then!” — and is nowhere more charming than when, as in the exchange with Chevalier above, she is delivering a comic line. And while her musical range was (to be extremely charitable) limited, and often required a great deal of manipulation in the editing rooms to put together whole usable takes, her vocalizations are unique, and uniquely charming. Would “Moon River” in Tiffany’s, composed by Mancini around her vocal limitations, and even taking into consideration Johnny Mercer’s peerless lyric, be quite as memorable if Hepburn hadn’t sung it? The sight of her on that fire escape, and the look of ineffable yearning she exhibits would be catastrophically diminished had the voice coming across the film’s soundtrack been anyone else’s. One wishes the people who made My Fair Lady had retained more of it.

Our concepts of beauty, as much as our notions about it, are of course ineluctably subjective. Quentin Crisp, for one, rejected the need for it. “The Greeks were mad about the human form,” he once noted. “So much so that during its heyday Athens must have looked like a dressmaker’s window during a weaver’s strike. But it was no help. Not one of the great classical statues has the least individuality that would make it desirable, or even interesting.” As with most of us, when Hepburn looked in a mirror she saw only her flaws. For her, beauty was, always, internal: “The beauty of a woman must be seen from in her eyes, because that is the doorway to her heart, the place where love resides.” Her love was such that, even in her final months, when she must have been in agony from the colon cancer that eventually killed her, in her capacity as a Goodwill Ambassador for UNICEF Hepburn’s primary concern was for the children of the world, and she devotedly lent her presence, and her passion, to what she rightly called the “nightmare” of 1992 Somalia. John O’Hara famously (or infamously) deplored Hepburn’s thinness, not knowing that, despite her lordly pedigree, Hepburn had been starved as a youth in Holland during the Second World War, and was simply incapable, in adulthood, of gaining weight. It was this, as much as her love for her own offspring, which gave her such a passionate drive to alleviate the horror of starving children.

Her mother, the Baroness Heemstra, imparted in young Audrey an essential dictum: “Manners, as she would say, don’t forget, are kindnesses.” Was it perhaps this that permitted her to accept public humiliations from her one-time husband Mel Ferrer without a murmur of protest or censure? After the very few recorded instances on a movie set in which Hepburn behaved, as she would term it, badly, her apologies were real, immediate, and, yes, charming. That sort of grace, as much as innate or even acquired poise, has never been in surplus; now, it seems barely to exist. Today we are far more likely to get a Christian Bale, screaming abuse and obscenities at some technician making a tiny fraction of his salary. We need Audrey Hepburn’s manners now as much as, if not more than, we did when she was with us.

Hepburn was famously snubbed at the Academy Awards in 1964, when residual anger at her “usurping” of what was felt to be a role in the sole possession of Julie Andrews in the movie of My Fair Lady mixed with resentment at her singing voice being melded with (and, unfortunately, overshadowed by) that of Marni Nixon insured her not being granted a nomination that year.‡ But those who have seen, and — there is no other word for it — adored Audrey in Funny Face, and who cherish her (admittedly heavily edited) rendition of “How Long Has This Been Going On?” regret that there was not a greater reliance on her own, utterly beguiling vocalese on the MFL soundtrack. (Nixon’s voice simply doesn’t match Hepburn’s. Whose did?) That she was photographed with Andrews after the Oscars ceremony wearing what seems to be a smile of genuine pleasure, is testament to those kindnesses so prized by her mother. It certainly made her look far more gracious than her critics.

5 Apr 1965 – Image by © Bettmann/CORBIS

Today’s Google Doodle reminds us that 4 April would, and should, have been Hepburn’s 85th birthday, and it seems as impossible now as it did in 1993 that this most vital of movie presences is no longer with us. Yet, of course, she is. Audrey Hepburn can never really leave us, so long as an appreciation of charm and kindness retain some sort of toehold, however tenuous, in the larger culture.

We, like Fred Astaire, loved her funny face.

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*I underrated Breakfast at Tiffany’s; seeing it again in 2021 confirmed for me how much better it is than my memory of it indicated. Mea culpa.

†Capote told Lawrence Grobel in a late-1980s interview that he would like to see Jodie Foster as Holly, in a more faithful adaptation. So would I. That, alas, never happened.

‡Andrews herself later said she had very little chance, as a movie novice known primarily for her Broadway roles, of netting the part and that, while she hoped for it, she didn’t expect it. It should also be remembered that Jack Warner paid a then-record price for the rights to film the show; that Rex Harrison, while respected, was not at the time a box-office figure (Warner offered it first to Cary Grant, who wisely turned it down); and that a top-line popular actress to star opposite Harrison was therefore essential. People should be glad that at least it was Hepburn; imagine Elizabeth Taylor as Eliza!

Text copyright 2014 by Scott Ross