Month: January 2021

Richard Amsel: A timeless sense of glamour

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By Scott Ross

Note: This is essentially a re-post of an earlier essay. One of the original images had inexplicably dropped off and the new WordPress “Blocks” system made it impossible for me to re-edit the post without altering and damaging it. Consequently, I have reassembled it here. I also discovered I had mis-attributed some artwork to Amsel which I had thought, in some cases for years, he drew (or in the case of the “The Seven Percent Solution” poster, completed) and have either removed them or amended their entries accordingly.

As before, most of these images, and much of the information, are from Adam McDaniel’s lovely Amsel tribute site.

Richard Amsel’s artwork, evocative of earlier eras but infused with a modernist’s wit and self-conscious sense of style, graced the posters for many of the iconic American movies of the 1970s. His magazine cover art, for TV Guide especially, shimmered and his book covers gave his subjects an eloquence to match their own contents. Although he died, a casualty of the AIDS pandemic, at the obscenely early age of 37, his best work is a timeless reminder of his own, particular and unduplicable, genius.


I first encountered this signature, as distinctive as the work it ornamented, on the poster art for Murder on the Orient Express in 1974. It became a talisman for me; whenever I saw it, I could feel reasonably sure of a rich visual experience to accompany the signature.

This, almost unbelievably, is the work of the 18-year old Amsel, for his high school yearbook, in 1965:

An early self-portrait.

I. Magazines
Amsel created a number of covers in the 1970s and early ’80s, often for TV Guide. Here, a delightful dual portrait of Carol Burnett and her gifted alter-ego, Vicki Lawrence:

Amsel’s study for a cover portrait of Lucille Ball, commemorating her retirement from regular series television (left), and the completed cover (right). As glorious as the finished product was, some hint of soul was lost in the process.

Amsel: “I did not want the portrait to be of Lucy Ricardo, but I didn’t want a modern-day Lucy Carter either. I wanted it to have the same timeless sense of glamour that Lucy herself has. She is, after all, a former Goldwyn Girl. I hoped to capture the essence of all this.”

He did.

Valerie Harper as Rhoda. Amsel captures both the actress and the character’s quirky and stylish clothing choices.

Sometimes the color balances on these beautifully rendered covers were distressingly off by the time the magazines hit the newsstands (ask your mother) and checkout aisles. Here is the art for two such: Hepburn’s ill-advised network television debut as a Connecticut Yankee Amanda Wingfield in The Glass Menagerie, and the telecast of Gone with the Wind.

Two beautiful Amsel portraits, for a cover story on John Travolta and the premier of Shōgun, respectively:

Other magazines: Note the Klimt hommage on the first GQ cover, left.

The then-current movie of The Great Gatsby did well enough at the box-office, thanks one presumes, to Redford’s presence, but its real impact was on fashion and style. Images from, and costumes for, it were almost ubiquitous in the popular magazines of 1974.

Lily Tomlin, for the cover of Time. She was then starring in her hit Broadway debut, Appearing Nitely. Amsel, having very little time to create this, drew on a photo of Tomlin used in conjunction with the show and added stars to illustrate that the funny youngster from Laugh-In who did Ernestine and Edith Ann had fully arrived.

II. Music
Amsel art for the front-and-back covers for two RCA Victor This is retrospective LPs from the early 1970s.

Appropriately enough for a young gay man in the ’70s, Amsel was drawn to two of the three big diva icons of the time. Here, Barbra Streisand in the oddly appropriate style of Gustav Klimt:

The cover of the Divine Miss M LP.

Amsel’s artwork for Bette Midler’s 1975 Clams on the Half-Shell Revue: Miss M as she might have been seen by Vargas.

The Divine Miss M in her most archetypal portrait. A New York friend who was there tells me, “This was 6 stories high on The Palace Theater in Times Square.”

Midler à la Alphonse Mucha. Artwork for the Songs for the New Depression LP.

Midler’s once-indispensable backup trio, The Staggering Harlettes.

III. Books
First, the Not-Amsels. Although I previously attributed to Richard Amsel the covers for two of the better paperback movie books of the early 1970s (Leonard Matlin’s Movie Comedy Teams and Marjorie Rosen’s Popcorn Venus) if I’d looked more closely I would have seen that the art for both of these distinctive, nostalgic pop-art designs were signed “Meisel.” You can see, I think, why I was so easily mistaken. There was a fashion illustrator (and, later, photographer) called Steven Meisel but Adam McDaniel informs me that this Miesel was Ann, “a classmate and friend to Richard Amsel.” (Thanks, Adam!)

Now for some genuine Amsel: First, for one of Peggy Hudson’s annual Scholastic Books television season run-downs. Note the psychedelic late-’60s visuals. Like, too mod!

The marquee will eventually read Act One: An Autobiography by Moss Hart. Interestingly for an account of an allegedly heterosexual man’s teenage years and early youth, and despite the leading lady here who seems to have eyes only for Mossy, there are no women to speak of in this justly famous theatrical memoir; Hart never mentions girls at all.

The clenched-fisted-men-against-the-world renderings by Amsel of Hart and George S. Kaufman are rather odd.

For a fascinating study of Fitzgerald’s Hollywood years (hotly refuted by Tom Dardis in his contemporaneous Some Time in the Sun) an appropriately shattered Scott, anchored by the Gatsby-esque figure at the bottom.

The unholy marriage of Mucha and Klimt: Sacred (Duse) and profane (Madams.)

Amsel’s cover art for The Madams of San Francisco without the text. Note the cursive signature and, arguably, the Bob Peak influence.

Also in modernist mode, Amsel’s cover for an early ’70s reissue of Romola de Pulszky’s 1934 biography of her husband Vaslav Nijinsky. The “major motion picture,” originally planned by the James Bond co-producer Harry Saltzman to be written by Edward Albee, directed by Tony Richardson and to star Rudolf Nureyev and Paul Scofield, would have to wait until later in the decade, when none of the principals would still be involved. More on this anon.

The “star” portraits are surprisingly undistinguished, but Amsel’s depiction of Selznick captures his intensity, his anxiety, and his essential alone-ness.

IV. Movie Posters
Here is the area in which Richard Amsel carved his most indelible niche, and made his deepest impact. He was doubly lucky to be working when he was. First, in the rich period of poster design before the photographic montage or single image completely supplanted hand-drawn poster artwork and, second, by creating exhibition illustration during the last great period of American movies during which, while some glamour still existed, taking a dramatic chance was de rigeur.

Hello, Dolly!: Amsel captures the “Gay 90s” feeling, filters it through late 1960s pop- and op-art and adds a Mucha headdress (with Spirographed flowers!) to promote a musical that nearly broke its studio. If only the movie itself had exhibited half as much joyous life as Amsel’s artwork for it.

An early Amsel poster, for the German release of a cultural landmark.

Amsel’s first poser art for Robert Altman. The real saloon-door plank on which it’s painted and the carved filigree to either side capture the Western setting while the portraiture suggests the quirky nature of the leads in this, one of the late filmmaker’s true masterpieces.

Amsel’s jokey portrait of Burt Reynolds here is a humorous nod to his then-recent Penthouse centerfold and the total picture a canny evocation of Frank Frazetta’s crime-caper comedy movie posters of the 1960s. (For those familiar with the Ed McBain 87th Precinct novels, Yul Brynner, at extreme left, played The Deaf Man.)

A slightly (Bob) Peak-ish study, for What’s Up, Doc? Amsel limns both the oddball romance of the thing and its classic face nature (the keys.) Top: The color version of the complete drawing. Bottom: A variation, cleverly bifurcated to represent the keys to the co-stars’ San Francisco hotel rooms. Streisand should have hired this man to be her full-time portraitist; she seldom looked more radiant than she did in one of his drawings.

Another one of those “If only the movie had been as distinguished” Amsel posters. That’s Ava Gardner in the background, as Bean’s unwitting inamorata Lily Langtree.

Variations on a theme: First, the superb Amsel image for Irvin Kershner’s underrated adaptation of the Anne Roiphe novel about a young married New Yorker ruefully contemplating her latest pregnancy through a series of wild fantasies and starring a non-singing Barbra. Note the integration of the star’s surname in the title. (And which should have forever ended the mispronunciation of it as “StreiZand,” but didn’t.) Second, the TIME magazine parody version.

One of Amsel’s most memorable designs, evoking the Saturday Evening Post of the 1930s.

Amsel based his concept for The Sting on J.C. Lyendecker’s “Arrow Collar” ads. That Lyendecker used his male lover as a model adds an interesting, if unintentional, twist to what was perceived by some critics as the movie’s un-articulated homoerotic undercurrent. (Adam McDaniel created this comparison image for his original Amsel website.)

A lovely Amsel image for the last Lerner and Leowe musical, best remembered for Gene Wilder’s sweetly uncanny Fox and Bob Fosse’s marvelous “Snake in the Grass” sand-dance in the desert.

Although I’d seen Amsel’s work before, his brilliant design for the Paul Dehn/Sidney Lumet adaptation of Murder on the Orient Express in 1974 was the first of his posters to completely capture my attention. It’s all there: The evocation of 1930s design, the starry cast, the train and even the murder weapon, its filigreed hilt beautifully incorporated into the image of the engine. Wouldn’t this make you want to see the movie? It certainly persuaded me. I still consider this one of the finest examples of the poster designer’s art in all of movies.

A splendid Amsel design for the Stanley Donen mis-fire Lucky Lady starring the third of the era’s big movie/musical divas. If the picture had been half as good as this…

An Amsel concept design for Nashville. Note that he captures the 24 main characters, the country-and-western milieu, and the sense, despite the seemingly amorphous quality of the complex narrative arc, that something is about to explode.

Amsel’s superb artwork for the writer-director Robert Benton’s nifty, semi-comic meditation on the hard-boiled L.A. gumshoe genre starring Lily Tomlin and Art Carney as a very sane kook and the aging shamus she hires.

The Shootist, John Wayne’s final movie. One dying legend playing another: Glendon Swarthout’s terminally ill gunslinger John Books, framed by Amsel faces on a gold and sepia base. (From top left: Richard Boone, Hugh O’Brien, Ron Howard, Sheree North, Lauren Bacall and James Stewart.)

Amsel’s original design for Voyage of the Damned (right) and the release poster (left), in which Janet Suzman’s image (at lower right) was replaced by that of Katharine Ross. A great, agonizing subject undone by tepid filmmaking and overwhelmed by too-starry a cast. On the other hand… Where are the comparable faces today who could fill out that cast-list?

From top left: Orson Welles, Malcom McDowell, Faye Dunaway, Max von Sydow, Oskar Werner, James Mason, Lee Grant, Helmut Griem, José Ferrer, Janet Suzman, Julie Harris, Fernando Rey, Dame Wendy Hiller, Ben Gazzara, Sam Wanamaker, Maria Schell, Michael Constantine and Suzman/Ross. (Not depicted: Denholm Elliott, Nehemiah Persoff, Leonard Rossiter, Victor Spinetti, Luther Adler and Jonathan Pryce!)

Amsel evokes Fin de siècle Vienna (and again, appropriately, the lithographs and jewelry designs of Alphonse Mucha) in his original poster art for Nicholas Meyer’s marvelous Sherlock Holmes pastiche The Seven-Per-Cent Solution. (From left: Nicol Williamson, Laurence, Olivier, Alan Arkin, Vanessa Redgrave.)

The final poster, re-designed and re-drawn by Drew Struzan, omits the woman’s arm and tempting cup (I’m not sure why Amsel included that, since the Redgrave character is being drugged by injections of cocaine, not deadly pots of tea) as well as Olivier’s Moriarty, keeping only his eyes, misterioso, at the center. Struzan also moves Redgrave to the top and refashions her, but essentially retains Amsel’s renderings of Williamson and Arkin.

Amsel’s glorious design for Julia. Jane Fonda’s Lillian Hellman is central, but is dominated by both Jason Robards’ Dashiell Hammett and Vanessa Redgrave’s eponymous figure — less distinct, and idealized, as Julia is for Lillian.

Striking concept art of Robert DeNiro and Liza Minnelli for Martin Scorsese’s ill-fated (and rather ill-conceived) New York, New York. The final poster used a photo of the stars.

Concept art for the pointless Farewell, My Lovely follow-up, and the completed poster. Mitchum as Marlowe; note that his mussed hair in the poster suits him better than the pompadour, as does the more lined, saggy face. Candy Clark in the Martha Vickers role clings, damsel-in-distress-like, to Chandler’s iconoclastic private detective and looks much more frightened in the finished work. Despite the great cast and the filmmakers’ hewing close to the novel, it’s a lousy movie — when you’ve seen Bogart and Bacall, directed by Howard Hawks, why bother? But that’s a terrific design.

Death on the Nile. It’s a variation on Amsel’s own Murder on the Orient Express design, but then the movie — charming and witty as it was — was a bit of a re-tread too. Still… what I wouldn’t give to see all of these actors alive and kicking again! (From top: Peter Ustinov, Maggie Smith, David Niven, Jack Warden, George Kennedy, Olivia Hussey. Mia Farrow, Bette Davis and Angela Lansbury.)

Un-used Amsel art for a forgotten Sylvester Stallone epic. One of the reasons, aide from his… shall we say, limited acting palette?… Stallone had to keep making Rocky and Rambo movies: His “big” brainchildren had an unfortunate tendency to flop, as this one did. That Felliniesque design does make you want to see the movie, though. And that’s what poster design is supposed to be all about.

The Muppet Movie. Another un-used concept design, and another picture for which Amsel’s artwork was supplanted by Struzan’s. Nonetheless, he captures the joy of the Muppets’ first picture, along with its highest moment (which came, unfortunately, right at the beginning): Kermit singing “Rainbow Connection.”

Sally Fields’ break-through movie performance, as Norma Rae Webster. The more well-known poster featured a photo of Fields triumphant, but Amsel’s portrait more nearly captures her anxieties and social class.

The unused concept for the eventual movie of Nijinsky. The golden-hued ballet designs emphasizing Nijinksy’s defining roles almost overwhelm the central figures (Leslie Browne, George de la Peña and Alan Bates.) Note de la Peña’s headband and damp locks, suggesting the sweat behind a great dancer’s art.

The completed design emphasizes the (so-called) love triangle, gives de la Peña sculpted prettyboy/matinee-idol hair, and opts for a single dance: Nijinsky’s L’après-midi d’un faune.

Amsel’s art, based on a lobby-card photo image, for the wonderful 1981 comedy All Night Long: Gene Hackman and Streisand moving into a clinch. Ironically, considering how much more acclaimed and popular than Amsel he has since become, the final poster art was by Drew Struzan… and it gave entirely the wrong idea about this charming comic romance, making it seem to unsuspecting audiences like a raucous sex-farce.

Amsel invokes 1930s screwball comedy, as well as the Damon Runyan characters, for this forgotten 1980s remake, written and directed by Walter Bernstein. Sort of makes you want to shell out your $3.50 to see the movie, though, doesn’t it? Indeed, now that Matthau and Curtis are gone and Andrews is an old lady I can’t help wanting to see it, on a big screen, even at three times the original admission price.

Amsel’s superb design for the George Lucas/Steven Spielberg/Lawrence Kasden Raiders of the Lost Ark, capturing the sepia-era quality of those movie serials that inspired it, the derring-do and brooding nature of Harrison Ford’s Indiana Jones, and the main desert setting. Left: The un-edited design. Right: The completed poster.

The reissue poster: Nothing makes a man smile faster than a monster box-office hit. Note Ford’s newly exposed chest and suggestive crotch-bulge.

Lily and Amsel, together again: Art for Jane Wagner’s comedic remake The Incredible Shrinking Woman. (Yeah, I know Joel Schumacher directed it. But in the beginning was the word.)

Amsel was commissioned, by the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences, to create this gorgeous design for the restored, rereleased version of A Star is Born. The pose is from the movie (“Here comes a big, fat close-up!”) and was used in the original 1954 ad campaign. Amsel emphasized the spotlights, added the stars and a made a slight change to Garland’s costume. Compare this with the original: Amsel’s “Vicki Lester” somehow has a greater sense of yearning.

Amsel captures an emblematic moment in American pop-culture for the laser-disc release of The Seven Year Itch. An elegant presentation of what is in fact Billy Wilder’s only truly bad movie. Even Kiss Me, Stupid is better.

Amsel’s design for this Graham Greene adaptation incorporates a portrait of Michael Caine: The eyes of God, watching the lovers. The picture is also known as Beyond the Limit, as though Greene had written some sort of fast ‘80s kiss-kiss/bang-bang techno-thriller rather than a typically thoughtful examination of the cynical political murder of a minor functionary.

La Streisand, as Yentl. You can see why Struzan’s work is so often mis-cited as Amsel’s.

Richard Amsel died just as his style of design was being phased out by the Hollywood studios in favor of the far less rich (but, presumably, much cheaper) photo-image that now dominates the American movie poster, to the detriment of the movies and the sorrow of those who valued an art that was once universal. And, for reasons that are for me somewhat inexplicable — perhaps due to his rock LP covers, or the fact he was associated, peripherally, with Star Wars… or just because he’s straight? — the fine but far less inspired Drew Struzan has gotten much more press in the last couple of decades than the almost infinitely more gifted Amsel, on whose work Struzan appears to have drawn, or was at the very least heavily influenced by. I’m not, by the way, knocking him for that; all creative people are affected by the work of those who precede them. I simply feel that Struzman’s is less distinctive and original than Amsel’s, and less praiseworthy.

Richard Amsel in the 1980s. As beautiful himself as the work he created.

We who love Amsel’s work can only express our deep thanks to Adam McDaniel for carrying the burden, and the illuminating torch, through efforts which include not only his splendid website (and his design of a square honoring Amsel for inclusion in the AIDS Memorial Quilt) but also a documentary and a celebratory book, both in the works, and godspeed the day. Thank you, Adam.

Special thanks as well to Amsel’s friend the late Bob Esty, for inspiring me to collect here, and comment on, these magnificent works of popular art.

Revised text copyright 2020 by Scott Ross

Monthly Report: December 2020

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By Scott Ross

Great Expectations (1946) One of David Lean’s best early features as a director, adapted from the Dickens novel by himself, the director Ronald Neame, Anthony Havelock-Allan, the actress Kay Walsh and Cecil McGivern. Gorgeously and disturbingly photographed by Guy Green and beautifully designed by John Bryan, the movie effectively telescopes the events of the book, at least until its unfortunate ending. Walsh wrote it, and while I take no issue with the notions of the adult Estella (Valerie Hobson) in danger of becoming the representation of her dead guardian nor of Pip (John Mills) bringing light to Miss Haversham’s rooms by opening the draperies, the sudden conversion of Pip’s former tormentor from brooding would-be recluse to laughing girl in love is risible, the only bad moment in the entire picture.

I could have done with more of Ivor Barnard’s Wemmick, Eileen Erskine’s Biddy and O.B. Clarence as Wemmick’s Aged Parent, but it’s the rare literary adaptation that gives us so much and yet leaves us wanting more. While at 38 John Mills was a decade and a half too old for the role of Pip, and looks it, he gives a lovely performance, balancing hope, despair and resolution, and the supporting cast is superb: The young Alec Guinness (whose own stage adaptation of the book gave Lean the notion of making the picture), endlessly cheerful and accommodating as Herbert Pocket; Martita Hunt, equally deluded and calculating as Miss Haversham; Bernard Miles, gentle and sweet-natured as Joe Gargery; young Anthony Wager as the boy Pip, quietly stalwart and movingly buffeted less by fate than the selfish ruses of his elders and “betters”; Jean Simmons, astonishingly beautiful and exquisitely ruthless as the young Estella, so ethereally lovely it’s difficult to accept the much plainer Hobson as an older version of the character; Francis L. Sullivan, coolly shrewd as Jaggers, whom Pauline Kael memorably described as “that alarming upholder of the law”; and, supremely, Finlay Currie, at first frightening, then entirely endearing as the convict Magwich, whose cunningly staged first appearance in the cemetery at the beginning of the picture caused contemporary audiences to gasp and jump in their theatre seats, and still startles the unwary today.

Notorious (1946) The second Hitchcock picture I saw as a teenager, at a late show screening (the first was North by Northwest, on television) Notorious, which I loved at 16, now seems to me to encapsulate everything both good and bad about its maker. Nothing in the nearly perfect script by the redoubtable Ben Hecht (and, as usual with him, an un-credited Alfred Hitchcock) is to blame for my uneasiness; it’s all to do with the alternately fussy and indifferent approach to the staging and photography. Why, for example, send a certifiably great cinematographer (Gregg Toland) to Rio to film rear-screen backgrounds and then make no attempt whatsoever to match them with your foreground shots, which seem phony in the extreme? Why make such a fetish of an elaborate crane shot from high in a mansion down to Ingrid Bergman’s hand, ludicrously clutching a key she has earlier tried desperately to conceal her possession of? Why show more care at framing a goddamned coffee cup than you do shooting your actors? These sorts of grandiloquent gestures, empty of feeling, which so delighted me in my movie-mad adolescence — Hitchcock’s slavish devotion to things rather than to people — are precisely what have turned me against so much of his work in the intervening decades.

That said, the picture is still endlessly fascinating for the way it plays its lovers against each other, the Cary Grant character’s wounded masculine pride militating against his very real feelings for Bergman’s estranged daughter of a Nazi spy. It’s a curiously perverse reaction, in that he sets her up as a lure for another Nazi (Claude Rains) and then faults her for succeeding so well; he’s a pimp who, like the mec in Irma La Douce, becomes insanely jealous of the whore on whom he makes his living. Hecht and Hitchcock’s distrust of the American government is obvious, astounding for the period, and wiser than either knew: The same sorts of intelligence agents they depict casually manipulating people here, in the pursuit of stopping old National Socialists from developing a hydrogen bomb, are stand-ins for the very men busily smuggling similar “ex”-Nazis into the Western Hemisphere after the war, expressly to work on our bombs. Neither could have been aware at the time of Operation Paperclip, but one can well imagine the professional Zionist Hecht’s reaction had he found out. But Grant and Bergman make a great team, he alternately doting on and sniping at her and she with that radiant anguish for which she pretty much held the patent in the 1940s. And Rains is oddly moving as their quarry; when he’s left to face certain death at the hands of his collaborators at the end, you ache for him in a way that feels uncomfortably ambiguous.

Oliver & Company (1988) The Disney animated feature just preceding The Little Mermaid, and pointing towards it. Its fulsome character design had a richer visual palette than was the case in ’70s Disney animation and, especially in the Bette Midler number, the picture suggested the Broadway and movie musical-savvy direction the studio, influenced by the lyricist/librettist Howard Ashman, was about to head. (Imagine: A Hollywood studio letting itself be directed by a lyricist!) Oddly, the characters were offset by stylized backgrounds in which all of the locations and most of the humans in them are rendered abstractly. The four exceptions in this loose adaptation of Oliver Twist are Fagin (Dom DeLuise), Sykes (Robert Loggia), the little rich girl (Natalie Gregory) who adopts the kitten Oliver (Joey Lawrence) and her butler Winston (William Glover). Fagin’s gang here are a pack of canine strays led by Billy Joel’s Dodger, who against his instincts gradually finds his resistance to Oliver melting, and which includes a preternaturally dumb Great Dane voiced by Richard Mulligan and a pompous, cultured bulldog given life by the great Roscoe Lee Browne. The Cheech Marin character Tito is roughly as annoying as an actual Mexican hairless, and Sheryl Lee Ralph’s Rita, whose singing voice was provided by Ruth Pointer, has too little to do to make a real as opposed to a vague impression. No Nancy, she. Midler, giving voice to the rich family’s pampered show poodle, also has a limited character to portray, one with no counterpart in Dickens. But she got a great, Busby Berkeley-like number called “Perfect Isn’t Easy” with apposite music by Barry Manilow and smart, funny lyrics by Jack Feldman and Bruce Sussman.* (For years I erroneously believed Ashman had written them but his work here was limited to the lyrics for Barry Mann’s opening anthem “Once Upon a Time in New York City”; still, that misapprehension is a compliment to Feldman and Sussman.) Oliver and Company is not, strictly speaking, a musical — it doesn’t have enough songs to qualify, few are related as the Midler number is either to plot or to individual character and, written by different teams, the score consists of too many warring styles for an organic feel — but it edges toward the form, and the staging of the numbers by the animating directors gives a hint of what was to come at Disney in the next few years.

The picture, if thin, is also sunny and agreeable despite the genuinely threatening presence of the homicidal Sykes, his menacing Doberman pets and a hair-raising subway and elevated chase at the climax that on a big theatre screen was suspenseful, and even, at times, genuinely terrifying. (It, and Sykes’ massive limousine, like Big Ben in Disney’s previous feature The Great Mouse Detective, were rendered by early computer animation, and look it.) George Scribner directed, and among the names associated with the movie are a number that would become prominent in the years to come: Kirk Wise, Roger Allers, Gary Trousdale, Tony Anselmo, Hendel Butoy, Andreas Deja, Mike Gabriel and the supervising animator Glen Keane.

Is it just me, or does “And now, with all its breakout joy” strike anyone else as an odd way to sell a movie? Wouldn’t the second clause of that sentence have been enough?

Cactus Flower (1969) When I first saw this one as an adolescent, on television in the summer of 1973, it delighted me. Watching it again, via HBO in the mid-’90s, it seemed flat — smirky and unsatisfying. Seeing it a third time recently, on Blu-ray, it struck me as bright and extremely funny. Since the movie hasn’t changed in a half-century, I assume I have. (All right, I know I have. I’m being coy for a reason.) If I see the picture again in a decade, will I go back to finding it dated and un-funny?

Maybe nostalgia has something to do with it. I was eight when the movie opened, and an immoderate fan of “Laugh-In,” on which Goldie Hawn was the adorable resident giggler. (The giggles were real; she couldn’t help it.) When she was given the Academy Award for the picture in 1970 there were grumbles, especially from the admirers of Dyan Cannon (Alice in Bob & Carol & Ted & Alice) and Susannah York, superb in They Shoot Horses, Don’t They? Seeing Cactus Flower now, when the award controversy has faded from most memories, it’s possible to simply enjoy Hawn’s performance as Walter Matthau’s kooky mistress for what it is: a very deft bit of comic acting accented by that charming wide-eyed wonder of Hawn’s which somehow cleanses the mildly risqué farce set-up, making it feel, despite her short skirts and dancer’s gams, about as erotic as a toothpaste ad.

It was, by the way, the dialogue and the performances I found so amusing this time around, not the wholly unconvincing plot (I.A.L. Diamond out of Abe Burrows via the French playwrights Pierre Barillet and Jean-Pierre Grédy). The spunky diegetic Quincy Jones score, a mélange of ’60s pop hit arrangements, also helps, augmented as it is by a lovely title song for which Cynthia Weill wrote the felicitous lyrics and Sarah Vaughan provided the lilting vocal. And speaking of nostalgia, it’s difficult not to feel something of the like watching Walter Matthau and Ingrid Bergman play out this essentially harmless silliness. Matthau of course was a master of the form, languid and wry, but Bergman makes the comedy feel completely grounded even as she gives in gloriously to the nonsense in which her character becomes enmeshed. 54 when the movie was made, she looks fabulous… but then she always did. Gene Saks, who the year before made the best of all Neil Simon movies with The Odd Couple, keeps the plot rolling along at a fast enough pace you don’t have much time to reflect on how ludicrous (and basically French) the whole thing is.

Roddy McDowall seems to be giving the cameraman a rather dubious look here. As well he should.

Midas Run (1969) Equally silly and inconsequential but with far less to recommend it, this comic caper from the same year as Cactus Flower has several small assets but, alas, only a single great one. The smaller include the featured players such as Ralph Richardson, Adolfo Celi, Maurice Denham, Cesar Romero (in an exceptionally nasty role as a rich, sadistic roué), John Le Mesurier and Roddy McDowall; a pair of pleasant lovers in Anne Haywood and Richard Crenna; a spritely Continental score by Elmer Bernstein; a reasonably intelligent and occasionally amusing if utterly unlikely screenplay by Ronald Austin, James D. Buchanan and Berne Giler; some lovely photography by Kenneth Higgin; and brisk editing from Fredric Steinkamp. The jewel, of course, is Fred Astaire. Taking on the unaccustomed role of a British MI6 agent, Astaire elevates his usual purring elegance only slightly. When he literally strides into the picture at the beginning and all you see are his legs, it takes only a moment to recognize that famous walk of his — purposeful yet festooned with infinite grace. It’s a close as he gets to dancing in the picture, but it’s enough.

The movie, a modestly budgeted flop on its release, is merest fluff. Yet the director, one Alf Kjellin, known mostly for his acting, takes a few things with almost unnerving seriousness, such as the big lovemaking scene between Crenna and Heywood, which he shoots and edits in the worst and most self-consciously “arty” manner imaginable, even for 1969; the few paying patrons of this one must have looked at each and wondered whether the projectionist had suddenly slipped in a reel from I Am Curious (Yellow). And along with Romero’s “Joker Meets The Marquis de Sade” sequence, the screenwriters also have Crenna at one point needlessly taunt McDowall by comparing him to an interior decorator, a line that reminds you precisely why Stonewall had to happen.

Die Hard (1988) If you ignore the inevitable franchise it spawned, to diminishing returns of pleasure, Die Hard remains an entertaining “high concept” picture, stylishly directed by John McTiernan and sharply adapted by Jeb Stuart and Steven E. de Souza from a much darker novel by Roderick Thorp, a brief sequel to his earlier brick of a bestseller The Detective. And if Bruce Willis’ smirk is too often on display, most of the supporting actors are poor, a few of them (Paul Gleason, William Atherton, Robert Davi and especially the appalling Hart Bochner) are wretched and none were helped by the sour dialogue they were given, still the structure is sound, Michael Kamen’s score and Jan de Bont’s cinematography decided assets, and Willis, Bonnie Bedelia, Reginald VelJohnson and Alan Rickman are all in excellent fettle.

Excalibur (1981) John Boorman’s low-budget epic out of Mallory, planned from the early 1960s, co-written by Rospo Pallenberg and filmed largely in the lush, sylvan vicinity of the director’s own Irish home, seemed thin and cold when it was new. It still seems thin and cold, but somehow I mind that less now. It certainly feels, by 21st century standards, no more undernourished than the latest American franchise or tent pole picture, or whatever they’re calling these things now and if nothing else it contains in Nicol Williamson’s marvelous performance as Merlin one of the great, hammy jobs by an outsized actor.

Whatever my reservations at 20, I was always impressed by Boorman’s vision, and his ability to express it on a minimal budget: The picture is lush and, within the limitations of low cash-flow and the special effects capacities of the time, magical. My only real cavil now has to do with the musical score. I don’t mind the overlays of Wagner and Orff — the use of excepts from Parsifal during the quest of Sir Percival (Paul Geoffrey) is very much to the point, and the “O Fortuna” out of Carmina Burana is more or less right for the Arthurian period. The problem is that Trevor Jones’ original compositions clash so badly with the interpolations. But Alex Thomson’s cinematography has both heft and delicacy and the production design (Anthony Pratt), art direction (Tim Hutchinson), set decoration (Bryan Graves) and costume design (Bob Ringwood) could scarcely be improved upon. And along with Nigel Terry’s very fine Arthur and Helen Mirren’s deliciously witchy Morgana, the striking pulchritude of a frequently naked Nicholas Clay as Lancelot, the Pre-Raphaelite beauty of Cherie Lunghi as Guenevere and the fiercely patricidal Mordred of Robert Addie you can also savor the robust early appearances of Gabriel Byrne, Liam Neeson and Patrick Stewart.

Summertime (1955) Has any European city ever been given so rapturous a cinematic frame as Venice gets in this David Lean adaptation of the Arthur Laurents  play The Time of the Cuckoo? Nearly every image in the picture shimmers with the ecstasy of a besotted lover’s glance, yet nothing in its feels like mere picture-postcard ostentation. Jack Hildyard’s color cinematography perfectly captures the lure of the city and the Katharine Hepburn character’s fascination with it, and seeing the movie in a good print can make you feel as if color photography was invented solely for this movie.

Lean, working with the novelist H.E. Bates and an un-credited Donald Ogden Stewart, condensed the Laurents play and flattened it, to the dramatist’s chagrin. It isn’t as fully peopled as The Time of the Cuckoo, and I think losing the moment where the Hepburn character makes trouble for the young married couple at her pensione out of pettiness over her own heartbreak is a mistake. I suppose it was done so the movie audience would not hate her, even momentarily, and the hint that she is capable of it must have been deemed enough.

Cecil Beaton infamously wrote about Hepburn’s bad skin in his diaries, and the color photography emphasizes how poorly she was aging. I also find her performance as a middle-aged Ohio(!) spinster finding romance with a philandering Venetian a bit much generally, what with its self-conscious posturing and overplayed emotional responses that make you long for Ingrid Bergman or Olivia de Havilland, both of whom were considered for the role. But Hepburn has some good, true moments, particularly in her scenes with charming little Gaetano Autiero as her unofficial ragazzi tour-guide. Rossano Brazzi makes a strong impression as her somewhat opportunistic lover, Jane Rose (who was in the play) and MacDonald Parke provide rich comic relief as the American tourists who stretch but never break the patience of everyone around them, and the recurrent musical theme by Alessandro Cicognini is a honey. Lean’s direction seems to me exactly right, whether the action takes place in the expanse of the Piazza San Marco or in one of Alexander Korda’s beautifully designed interior sets and it’s obvious that this, the director’s first picture in color, expanded his already impressive sense of vision enormously.

Experiment in Terror (1962) A tight little thriller written by the Gordons and directed by Blake Edwards with a strong feeling both for the suspenseful elements and for the city of San Francisco, which he and his gifted cinematographer Philip H. Lathrop shot with clear eyes and a little, perhaps inevitable, romanticism, in crisp black and white.

As the young bank teller targeted by a possibly homicidal thief Lee Remick acts with that ineffable mixture of strength and vulnerability which were her particular forte, and she is especially effecting in the opening sequence in which she is first accosted by her tormentor, filmed by Edwards in long, and very tense, takes that would be unheard of in today’s filmmaking climate, where the camera doubtless would be flying over her head and rotating madly around her body.

The young Stefanie Powers makes a strong showing as Remick’s teenage sister, and the last shot of her, traumatized into wide-eyed catatonia, makes you worry for her future. Ross Martin, hidden even from the opening credits and deliberately shot obliquely by his director until well into the picture, is properly frightening, so much so that when he shows up in drag late in the proceedings you aren’t even tempted to giggle. Patricia Huston is splendid as a woman with a secret, Anita Loo and Warren Hsieh as a “subject of interest” to the cops and her invalid son get a couple of fine scenes, Ned Glass has an excellent role as a paid police stool-pigeon, Roy Poole and Clifton James good ones as FBI agents and even Glenn Ford is better than usual as the chief investigator. Henry Mancini wrote one of his distinctive suspense scores, appropriately taut and creepy but with time out for some contemporary jazz and a little ersatz Gay Nineties pop for the sequence in the ludicrously overstated theme-bar.

It Happened One Night (1934) Frank Capra’s best movie, with a nearly perfect screenplay by Robert Riskin from Samuel Hopkins Adams’ 1933 novella “Night Bus,” concerning a runaway heiress’s misadventures on the road. Riskin cannily mated Adams’ charmingly wiseacre picaresque with the then-popular “newspaper picture,” and turning Peter Warne (Clark Gable) from an unemployed engineer to a fired reporter automatically raised the stakes for the leads. (It also grounds Warne’s educated wit and savvy.)

Gable and Claudette Colbert were both reluctant stars of the movie but Gable gradually understood while filming how good it, and his role, were; Colbert never did. Both were given Academy Awards — in the first such “clean sweep,” so did Capra, Riskin and the picture itself — and they’re a terrific comic/romantic pair, deftly batting sharp wise-cracks at each other as they slowly fall in love. Walter Connolly shines as Colbert’s millionaire father, Alan Hale has a funny sequence as an aria-singing crook, Ward Bond effectively portrays a surly bus driver, and Roscoe Karns is appropriately nasty as a smug, vulgar opportunist.

It Happened One Night is sometimes described as a screwball comedy, and it isn’t, really. But there’s not a line, a scene or a moment in the picture that plays false, and Capra’s populism is blissfully and blessedly unfettered by his usual simultaneously grandiloquent celebration of, yet ambivalent unease with, The People. If there is anything else in his work as unabashedly sexy as the “Walls of Jericho” sequence, or as effortlessly charming as the joyous impromptu sing-along on the bus in this movie, I’m unaware of it. Very few pictures provide as much unalloyed pleasure as this one and if there are people who hate it I don’t want to know who they are.

Murder on the Orient Express (1974) The perfect escapist movie with which to mark the beginning of the end of a truly terrible year, the worst of whose machinations were pretty obviously manufactured. An all-star enterprise, and what stars! Who have we now to compare with the likes of Albert Finney, Martin Balsam, Ingrid Bergman, Sean Connery, John Gielgud and Wendy Hiller? Who like Paul Dehn to write, Sidney Lumet to direct, Tony Walton to design, Geoffrey Unsworth to photograph and Richard Rodney Bennett to score?

Note to ambitious actor/directors: This is how you make a glamorous movie mystery whose stylistic flourishes compliment, yet do not overwhelm, the material.

I Bury the Living (1958) Steven H. Scheuer in his Movies on TV deemed this atmospheric little B-movie chiller “3⁄4s of a good thriller,” which seems exactly right. Generally well-written by Louis A. Garfinkle and effectively directed by Albert Band, it’s a little overstated — characters tell each other what they should already know, never a good sign — the ending is a bit of a letdown, Gerald Fried’s hysterical score is appallingly bad, and Theodore Bikel’s old-age makeup is wretched. (Although that may owe more to the otherwise good Blu-ray remastering than to the black-and-white original. In a time when the reporters’ faces in the screening room at the beginning of Citizen Kane, deliberately obscured by Orson Welles, get fully revealed by digital ignoramuses, one never knows.) But within the parameters of its flaws and budgetary limitations lies a compelling story about a reluctant cemetery chairman (Richard Boone) who may or may not have telekinetic abilities, the retiring caretaker (Bikel) both more and less than he seems, and a map that at times appears malevolently alive. Boone gives his usual peerless performance, Band had a keen eye for framing, Frederick Gately’s cinematography is effective and despite the picture’s shortcomings (or perhaps because of them?) watching I Bury the Living seemed to me the perfect way to bid adieu to the deliberately-planned worst year of the 21st century.

*Note for the trivial-minded: In the early ’70s, Manilow was Midler’s musical director and accompanist at the Continental Baths in New York where both got their start, so Oliver & Company marked a pleasant reunion.

Text Copyright 2021 by Scott Ross

Necrology: October – December 2020

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By Scott Ross

OCTOBER

Ain’t Misbehavin’: Armelia McQueen, Nell Carter and Charlaine Woodard

Armelia McQueen, 68. With Nell Carter and Charlaine Woodard, one of the original three ladies who sang with the band in that vest-pocket hurricane Ain’t Misbehavin‘ (1976). Situated about midway between Woodard’s wide-eyed stridency and the take-no-prisoners sass of Carter, McQueen was the jolly fat girl whose eyes could, in a moment, flash from daffy to deadly and her sweet mezzo gave sex to “Squeeze Me,” opéra bouffe grandiosity to “When the Nylons Bloom Again” and, flawless comic aplomb to “Find Out What They Like” (with Carter) and “Two Sleepy People” (with Ken Page). Her later career did not live up to that promise, but how many performers get even one hit the size of that one?

Johnny Nash, 80. Initially marketed as a rival to Johnny Mathis (because two young black male singers with extended ranges in the high registers must be performing in opposition to each other, right?) Nash eventually scored a million-selling hit with his reggae-based “I Can See Clearly Now,” which he also wrote, in 1972. Although the recording is slightly marred at the end by those weird, unnecessary sounds of… what? lasers swooping?… the song itself is one of the nearly unalloyed joys of a great period of popular music, and Nash’s glorious, almost androgynous voice pours over it like honey on a griddle-cake. When I was 11, every time I heard the song on the radio, no matter what my mood was, I immediately felt better. Two minutes and 45 seconds of exhilaration.

Margaret Nolan, 76. If, like me, you have a fondness for the James Bond pictures, you know Norman as the gold-painted model in print ads, on the LP art and in the main title sequence of Goldfinger (1964) in which she was also on display, in the first scene, as Bond’s masseuse. Later that year she had a brief role in the most joyously entertaining musical made after 1960, The Beatles’ A Hard Day’s Night.

Conchata Ferrell, 77. I first became aware of Ferrell, that marvelous comedian with the improbable name, as April Green, the jovial hooker on the then-controversial Norman Lear-produced sitcom version of Lanford Wilson’s rich ensemble play The Hot l Baltimore in 1975. (She had originated the role at Circle in the Square.) The show, which also introduced me to those comic marvels Charlotte Rae, Al Freeman Jr., James Cromwell and Richard Masur, provoked howls of outrage in the hinterlands owing to the seedy residential hotel’s two prostitutes (one of them what would now condescendingly be called an “illegal immigrant”) and a somewhat prissy middle-aged gay couple. Sadly, ABC canceled it after a half-season, not out of cowardice but because the series couldn’t capture a large enough audience. But Farrell’s April was a sunny, cynical presence on the show, as notable for her vulnerability as for her distinctive belly-laugh. I saw her next in small roles in Network and on Maude, Lou Grant, St. Elsewhere and Frank’s Place before she turned up for a season on L.A. Law, but Ferrell also did acclaimed work opposite Rip Torn in the independent picture Heartland in 1979. For twelve years she made sour wisecracks sound like choice lines from a screwball comedy on Two and Half Men. The show earned her the widest audience she’d ever known, and I suppose a form of immortality. But, Christ, I hope the pay was one hell of a lot better than the scripts.

Connery in 2009. (Photo by Uri Schanker/WireImage)

Sir Sean Connery, 90. Sean Connery was a fixture of my personal cultural life since the first television airing of Goldfinger in 1972; I’d seen him a couple of years earlier in a reissue of Darby O’Gill and the Little People but scarcely remembered him, what with the leprechauns, banshees and ghostly Cóiste Bodhar. As it is for everyone, James Bond was a velvet trap, earning him money and worldwide fame but typing and limiting him as an actor. Despite several fine performances, often for Sidney Lumet, in such off-beat pictures as Marnie, The Hill, A Fine Madness, Shalako, The Molly Maguires, The Anderson Tapes and The Offence, it was not until he removed his toupée and took on the mantle of character actor that he was finally able to shake off 007, resume his status as a bankable star and prove to those who deal only in surfaces what an interesting and intelligent actor he always was.

Goldfinger: Gert Frobe presides over one of the most squirmingly effective sequences in ’60s cinema, a castration nightmare not in Ian Fleming’s novel but which he would almost certainly have approved had he lived to see it.

That is not to knock his performances as Bond, although often the movies themselves let him down. While I tend to think that Daniel Craig is closest to the James Bond of Fleming’s novels, even unto his slight resemblance to Hoagy Carmichael, Connery embodied the character better than anyone aside from Craig, locating the character’s cavalier cruelty as well as his off-hand charm. If Dr No is a bit perfunctory (and, occasionally, uncertain), From Russia with Love comes close to capturing Fleming’s slightly queasy perversity and Goldfinger is even better, the overall best in the series before Skyfall. Where the early Bonds betrayed Connery, and Fleming, was in their embrace of gadgetry and bigger-is-better design. Thunderball was pretty much conceived that way, by Fleming among others, and its action sequences were hampered by taking place underwater, so I doubt it could have been improved upon. But there’s little excuse for how bad You Only Live Twice is. The original novel was astounding, deathish in the way perhaps only a man who’d just survived heart trouble could imagine, might have made a sharp, disturbing movie and indeed could make a superb one now, for Craig. Connery’s return, Diamonds Are Forever, is rather better, but he looks pudgy and discomfited throughout. And his own 1980s Bond, Never Say Never Again, was just Thunderball Redux, if slightly less wet.

Connery almost seemed to grow as an actor as soon as he shed his toupée. He played a stolid, rather thankless, role as Vanessa Redgrave’s gallant lover for Sidney Lumet in the latter’s stylish 1974 Murder on the Orient Express, which I hear some pretentious ass of an actor/director “remade” recently. A year later he was on sturdier ground, first as a Berber insurrectionist(!) for John Milius in The Wind and the Lion, and then, gloriously, a Daniel Dravot so perfectly realized Rudyard Kipling would surely have applauded, for John Huston in his adaptation of The Man Who Would Be King. This is the real beginning of the re-evaluation of Connery, post-Bond, as one of the English-speaking world’s more interesting and versatile screen actors. In rapid succession there were the revisionist James Goldman/Richard Lester Robin and Marian (1976), in which Connery was an aging, bitter Robin Hood to Audrey Hepburn’s exquisite Maid Marian; the real-life Major General Roy Urquhart, dealing with German troops, laughing madmen and a bridge that won’t be taken in A Bridge Too Far (1977, written by James’ brother William); Michael Crichton’s charming, funny caper The Great Train Robbery (1978); the rather good Richard Lester flop Cuba (also 1979); the 1981 High Noon-in-space variation Outland (1981); a robust, likable Agamemnon for Terry Gilliam in Time Bandits (also 1981); a cynical television reporter in Richard Brooks’ fine, underseen satire Wrong is Right (1982); the inquisitive monk Williams of Baskerville in the 1986 transliteration of Umbero Eco’s oddly homophobic medieval whodunnit The Name of the Rose; the Irish(!!) cop Malone in the overblown but occasionally effective 1987 Brian de Palma/David Mamet The Untouchables, for which Connery won the Best Supporting Actor Oscar. In 1989 he wittily sent himself up as Harrison Ford’s academician father in Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade (1989) and, in 1990, was wonderfully sly and emotional as Barley Blair in the beautiful Fred Schepisi/Tom Stoppard adaptation of John le Carré’s waning-Cold War thriller The Russia House.

I missed most of Connery’s later performances, but then I missed most movies of that era; he stopped making pictures around the time I stopped going to new ones, and for the same reason: Those he called the “idiots now making films in Hollywood.”

Alas, one can all too easily imagine the idiots’ reaction to Connery’s critique: “Oh, yeah? What’s he done lately?”

NOVEMBER

Groucho Marx with Dom DeLuise and Carol Arthur, circa 1973. (Photo by Michael Ochs Archives/Hulton Archive/Getty Images)

Carol Arthur, 85. Nowhere near as well-known as her late husband Dom DeLuise, Arthur had memorable small roles in movies, mostly for Mel Brooks: Sweetly reading out the slightly obscene letter to the Governor as Harriett Johnson in Blazing Saddles; as George Burns’ gentle daughter in The Sunshine Boys; and as the pregnant woman who sets Brooks’ yellow Morgan back on two wheels in Silent Movie. She was also in The World’s Greatest Lover, Robin Hood: Men in Tights and Dracula: Dead and Loving It, and I am very sorry to note that she died of Alzheimer’s, with which she’d been diagnosed in 2009.

Geoffrey Palmer, 93. Britain’s answer to Walter Matthau in the phlegmatic hang-dog rubber-face sweepstakes, Palmer was known largely as a television performer. Given the quality of the series in which he appeared, however, only a true snob could attach any opprobrium to that. He was the doctor determined to eat his breakfast despite Basil Fawlty in “The Kipper and the Corpse” episode of Fawlty Towers; Leonard Rossiter’s brother-in-law Jimmy in David Nobbs’ The Fall and Rise of Reginald Perrin (1976 – 1978), forever cadging a meal (“bit of a cock-up on the catering front”) and in a classic scene, preparing for the day “the balloon goes up”; the imperturbable husband of Wendy Craig in the charming Butterflies (1978 – 1983); and as partner to Judi Dench in the pleasant but (to me) inexplicably popular As Time Goes By (1992 – 2005). His film roles were fewer, and less showy, but he was in O Lucky Man!, Clockwise, A Fish Called Wanda, Tomorrow Never Dies and as Dr. Warren in the film of Alan Bennett’s The Madness of George III in which to an importuning interloper in church he memorably snaps, “I’m praying, God damn it!”

David Prowse, 85. The man in the iron mask, his voice forever supplanted by that of James Earl Jones, Prowse was both anonymous and universally recognized… as long as he was under his Darth Vader costume.

Typically, in its own necrology list Wikipedia attempted to pass off Prowse’s death as being “caused” by COVID-19. Yet even that venerable font of misinformation can’t always carry off its own lies; go to Prowse’s entry, and this is what confronts you: “Prowse died at a hospital in London, England, on 28 November 2020, aged 85, after a short, unspecified illness [emphasis mine].” We’ll call anything COVID-19 if we think it can peddle a little useful fear.

DECEMBER

Ann Reinking, 71. The second great muse of Bob Fosse after Gwen Verdon (or, if you prefer, the fourth following Mary Ann Niles, Joan McCracken and Verdon) and the possessor of the best pair of dancer’s legs since the heyday of Cyd Charisse. She was in the chorus of Coco and Fosse’s Pippin, where the pair became romantically involved and later won leading roles in the Sherman Brothers’ Andrews Sisters musical Over There! and Good Time Charley, in which with her raspy whiskey-contralto the sexiest dancer-singer of her time played Jon of Arc. It was a strange time for musicals, obviously.

She then became the replacement of choice: For Verdon in Fosse’s Chicago and for Donna McKechnie in Fosse’s chief rival Michael Bennett’s A Chorus Line before appearing in a leading dance role in Fosse’s Dancin’. (Increasingly known for her absences, Reinking was alas out the afternoon I saw the show.) She was also in Fosse’s semi-autobiographical movie All That Jazz, in which she essentially played herself opposite Roy Scheider’s Fosse and had two great numbers: A charming duet with Erzebet Fioldi to Peter Allen’s “Everything Old is New Again” and, near the end, in the extended, Felliniesque hospital fantasy sequence, a sexy, sizzling “There’ll Be Some Changes Made,” complete with patented Fosse bowler and limp-wristed finger-snaps. For those who never got to see her onstage in a Fosse show, these are compensations of a very high order.

Reinking photographed by Jack Mitchell

Although Reinking had retired from performing by 1996, she was asked by the City Center Encores! program to choreograph a staged concert reading of Chicago “in the style of Bob Fosse” and to play Verdon’s Roxie Hart role. The concert was such a success it led to a Broadway revival, also with Reinking. Interestingly, for a show that was a hard sell in 1975 and which while successful did not run nearly as long as Fosse had hoped, the “stripped-down,” black-and-white revival played for nearly 24 years, its ridiculously long run only curtailed by official overreach in response to the engineered “pandemic” of 2020. I’m not sure why this Chicago ended up as the longest-running American musical production since it had a look of overall cheapness and, however energetic and well choreographed was still, essentially, a staged concert. I suspect the public, prepped by Lorena Bobbett, Tanya Harding and O.J. Simpson and the circuses surrounding them had caught up to the show’s cynicism about the unholy wedding of violent crime and media excess. Even less explicable, to me, was the success of Reinking’s subsequent endeavor, re-creating signature Fosse dances for the 1998 revue bearing his name. Maybe because I had seen and loved Dancin’ in 1979, Fosse had the feel of going to the same well twice too often. But the show was a hit, so what do I know?

John le Carré (David John Moore Cornwell), 89. A former MI5 and MI6 agent, for the first of which he spied on left-wing groups (which Wikipedia conveniently labels “far-left”) trying to ferret out dirty commies, when Cornwell began writing and publishing novels he was required to do so under a pseudonym. “le Carré” translates as “the square,” the meaning of which, for Cornwell, I cannot begin to fathom. If I seem to be taking a snide tone here against a writer whose books I admire enormously, there are two reasons. One: My enjoyment of spy fiction and James Bond movies to one side, an implacable loathing for intelligence services, which over my lifetime and before have made the world a more violent, dangerous and unstable place in the name of some sort of weird, fanatical devotion to a thing they inevitably label “security,” but which in their hands makes everyone and everything infinitely less secure. Two: le Carré’s very public opposition to the right of Salmon Rushdie (and, by extension, everyone else on earth) to “insult” a religion “with impunity.” That anti-free speech stand, I argue, emboldens the religious of all stripes to persecute, and murder, those with whom they disagree and who they feel have somehow “insulted” their god. As Stephen Fry among others has argued most persuasively, blasphemy laws have no right to exist in a civilized society, and no one on earth, let alone in Britain, deserves what happened to Rushdie. Indeed it is the very compassion so plentifully on display in le Carré’s books that made his inflexibility on the subject of free speech so astonishing, and so dispiriting. (Yet he later, citing something Hillary Clinton termed “fake news,” rather blithely accused Donald Trump as being tantamount to Nazi book burners…)

Those reservations aside, to read a le Carré novel is to be in the hands of a man whose intelligence was keenly matched by his creativity. His best work transports the reader to dangerous avenues of intercourse where no while one is to be fully trusted yet faith in someone else is imperative for the emotional, if not the physical, health of his protagonists. Often there is betrayal, sometimes a happy (or, in the case of The Russia House, a hopeful) ending, usually a despairing one, as in The Constant Gardener, which contains one of the most anguished, painfully moving climaxes I’ve read in any modern novel. That book is le Carré in a mood of white-hot fury, which may come as a shock to those who relish his phlegmatic George Smiley, so beautifully encased in the amber of the BBC’s multi-part adaptations of Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy and Smiley’s People starring Alec Guinness but which seemed increasingly a component of his fiction. How a man this sharp could so easily buy into the phony Trump/Putin “collusion” narrative is, like his earlier unwitting embrace of religious intolerance, a mystery requiring a Smiley to unravel.

Peter Lamont, 91. Although I suppose they were, to employ an over-used word, iconic, it has long seemed to me that Ken Adams’ fantastic sets for the 1960s James Bond pictures were part of what made the series increasingly ridiculous. (And what was that obsession of his with spherical patterns?) Lamont’s less fanciful designs gave the 1980s and ’90s Bonds a reality against which to play out their preposterous action. Lamont worked as an un-credited draftsman on Goldfinger (1964); a set decorator (again without credit) on Thunderball (1965) and with credit on You Only Live Twice (1967), On Her Majesty’s Secret Service (1969) and Diamonds Are Forever (1971). He was the art director on Live and Let Die (1973), The Man with the Golden Gun (1974) and The Spy Who Loved Me (1977); in charge of all those terrible Star Wars knock-off visual effects for Moonraker (1979); and full production designer on For Your Eyes Only (1981), Octopussy (1983), A View to a Kill (1985), The Living Daylights (1987), Licence to Kill (1989), GoldenEye (1995), The World Is Not Enough (1999), Die Another Day (2002) and Casino Royale (2006). He also worked on Chitty Chitty Bang Bang (1968); was the set decorator on Fiddler on the Roof (1971) — an extremely important job on that picture, with its wealth of lived-in shtetl detail; and the production designer on Aliens (1986) and Titanic (1997), the last of which got him an Academy Award.

Collage by Mega

David Giler, 77. Giler wrote what many regarded as a superb adaptation of Gore Vidal’s wild satirical novel Myra Breckenridge which was then allegedly re-written and destroyed by a forgotten nonentity called Michael Sarne. Giler did some writing on the very likable James Garner comedy The Skin Game (1971) and, with Lorenzo Semple, Jr., also wrote a very strong adaptation of Loren Singer’s thriller The Parallax View (1974) which while disdained by the novelist gave Alan J. Pakula an excellent springboard for his second paranoia thriller after Klute (1971) and before All the President’s Men (1976). Giler’s directorial debut, a would-be comic sequel to The Maltese Falcon called The Black Bird (1975) was perhaps too determinedly wacky to be amusing, but his next picture, as producer, was one of the most genuinely shocking, and frightening, movies of its time, the eventual progenitor (rather in the reproductive manner of its parasitic monster) of a series which, alas, seems to have no end: The brainchild of the gifted Dan O’Bannon, Alien (1979), on which Giler wrote some script revisions, was a shot across the space-fantasy bow, stylishly directed by Ridley Scott, terrifyingly populated with creatures out of H.R. Giger’s demented “biomechanical” imagination, brilliantly scored by Jerry Goldsmith and wonderfully designed by Ron Cobb and Chris Foss. Giler worked as well on the 1986 Aliens, writing the story (with Walter Hill) and serving as the Executive Producer; as the screenwriter (with Hill and Larry Ferguson) and co-producer of Alien3 (1992) and in a production capacity on all of its successors to 2017. It says something about Giler, as well as about the American movie industry, that not only could he not walk away from the lure of a perpetual sinecure, he couldn’t seem to do anything else.

Lee Wallace and Tony Roberts in The Taking of Pelham One Two Three. (Photo by Michael Ochs Archives/Getty Images)

Lee Wallace, 90. Although Wallace had roles in such pictures as Klute, The Hot Rock and Private Benjamin, it is as the comically bedridden mayor in that great time-capsule thriller The Taking of Pelham One-Two-Three (1974) that he is best and most enthusiastically remembered. Clearly cast for his resemblance to Ed Koch, Wallace was the very picture of the annoying, weaselly professional politician infinitely more concerned with his image (“How’m I doin’?”) than with the people of his city. We in the audience, then and now, would far rather have had Wallace’s faux-Koch than the real thing.

Claude Bolling, 90. Bolling is best known in the U.S. for his series of recorded suites that fused swing jazz with orchestral forms, often in a Baroque vein. The first of these, Suite for Flute and Jazz Piano Trio featuring Jean-Pierre Rampal (1975) was an enormous success and was followed by Concerto for Classical Guitar and Jazz Piano with Alexander Lagoya (1976), Suite for Violin and Jazz Piano with Pinchas Zuckerman (1977), Concerto for Classic Guitar and Jazz Piano with Angel Romero (1980), Picnic Suite with Rampal and Lagoya (1980), Toot Suite with Maurice Andre (1981), Suite for Chamber Orchestra and Jazz Piano with Rampal (1983) and Suite for Cello and Jazz Piano Trio with Yo Yo Ma (1984). All of the LPs featured witty, airbrushed cover art by Roger Huyssen. An occasional movie composer, Bolling also wrote the score for the movie of Neil Simon’s California Suite, similar in tone and approach to his LP suites.

Copyright 2020 by Scott Ross